“What are we going to do with Chips when she gets well?” said Teresa. “I can’t bear to go away and leave her here. Mrs. Vachell would get her altogether in time and mother wouldn’t be any good. Mother thinks that when she says what fine creatures women are and all that, and when Mrs. Vachell begins on the same subject, they both mean the same thing. But they don’t. Did you know that? Mrs. Vachell is quite serious.”
“Yes, I knew that,” he answered. “She told me herself that nothing was too bad to do in the cause of the noblest of God’s creatures, and a woman in that frame of mind is always beyond a joke. You can’t get it into their heads that there are certain things that are not done, such as vitriol and so on. Not that I have heard of any of them doing that, but she seemed to be speaking inclusively.”
“No, that sort of thing isn’t a bit like her. Really father, it isn’t. I only meant that the more depressed Chips gets about being away from Evan the more Mrs. Vachell uses it to make it impossible for her ever to go back. Chips is quite right in saying that she can’t live here. It would be so dreary for her and she hates having no explanation for it. People will think that either she or Evan have done something bad. And it is cruel to think of her without a man for the rest of her life; it is far worse than being a widow. I don’t think either you or mother have realised that.”
“It hadn’t, as you say, occurred to me that they wouldn’t finish it up sometime. I hope marriage doesn’t mean too much to her after all. I have always supposed that so long as people mind their own business there is very little to complain of.”
As he stopped speaking, a long, high-pitched sound, seeming to come from nowhere in particular and too faint to be more than just audible, rose, grew and died away again. Teresa turned white and looked at her father with frightened, questioning eyes.
“Was it a lie that Strickland told me about my hot bottle?” she asked. “Didn’t she want me to go up?”
“I expect not,” said Cyril. “You can’t do anything. Would you like me to get the car out? We can wrap up quite warm.”
“No, what is the good of running away,” she answered. “I have got to know. But Strickland said it was nothing. She was quite indignant and was going to tell me that there are people who aren’t as well looked after as Chips, but I wouldn’t listen. Let’s go on talking. I do so want to get out of this mess of pity on to a road that leads somewhere. It is like being for ever shot at and hurt by something you can’t see. Strickland is wrong. Evidently in the main things one person suffers as much as another.”
“I’ve often told you you were worrying unnecessarily,” said Cyril. “I am sorry we didn’t send you away just now, but I never thought of it and your mother doesn’t descend to details much, as you know. She takes the most alarming things as a matter of course. I believe she was born a favourite of the gods. I found out the other day that she has never had a tooth out. I was away when Chips was born and, as I told you, I spent the night of your arrival in the Turkish bath, so I don’t know what happened; but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear she slept through it.”
The door opened and Susie came in. As she stood there for a moment a smell unknown to Teresa came in with the air from the passage.