“No, I must say I am glad there are two,” said Teresa. “But then I am ‘fairf’lly bored,’ as you call it, with the idea of anything being ‘middle class.’ Perhaps that is newer still. I hope not for your sake. However, in the meantime I am ever so grateful for what you have done for Evan. My sister is so happy about having him back and that he is going to do something he will like so awfully. I hope it won’t bore your father, having him there.”
“Oh no, my father’s never bored,” said Joseph. “That’s really th’ thing about him that bores me sometimes, ’f you know what I mean.”
The train stopped for the last time and Teresa got out into the brightly-lit station. Outside it there was semi-darkness, and the mud dripping imperceptibly. Along the slimy pavements three or four of the little boys to whom she had ladled out hot-pot and plum pudding ran to and fro, shouting the latest news. “—’clock ‘Echo’—special edi—shun! six-o’clock—‘Echo’—’clock—edi—shun! ‘Echo’—riots—in—Blankshire—forty-seven—persons—injured! ‘Echo’—edi—shun—serious-rioting—in Midland—town—forty-seven—’ere you are, sir.—’clock—‘Echo’——” and away he sped. “I wonder if he has got any awfulness buttoned into his waistcoat for Grannie to-night,” thought Teresa, “or whether she died——. Shall I ever be able to stand knowing that ‘Grannie’ and the waistcoat are there and I am with David, and not doing anything?”
“I met Joseph Price to-day,” she said to her father when she got home. “He has really been very good about Evan. I believe he invented the whole idea himself. Mr. Price seems suspicious about it and wants to have Evan at the works here first, to make sure that he is all right. David says he is quite sure that he is in fact what is wanted, and there won’t be any difficulty, as he keeps on saying, but how Joseph knew, or why he took the trouble, I can’t imagine. He is such an absolute ass and yet he seems to pick up ideas and he makes the old man do just what he likes. He is also the greatest snob and time-server, and yet he will do anything or go anywhere for anybody for no reason. Fisk was in the train, raving about blood as usual, and Joseph said he was going to ask him to stay for a week-end and meet some of the people who are coming down about the election. Joseph will sit there quite undisturbed by his family and get any amount of amusement out of the fluttering in the dovecot there will be, and Lady Varens says that Mrs. Lake—the select Mrs. Lake—thinks he would make a nice son-in-law. She thought that he liked Lady Angela Brackenbury who started the inn, the Star and Garter. They wanted to have the Duke’s Star and Garter framed as a sign outside. I am getting so muddled with them all. I couldn’t go and live there if it weren’t for David. Joseph told me he was bored with sex, so I suppose, as he can’t find anything newer than a woman to marry, it won’t be either of them and the Price money will have to go to anyone who marries the girls after Joseph has lolled about on it enough. It is distracting to ravel out.”
“You’ve got an abnormal love of the social order,” said Cyril. “You’d much better leave it alone and concentrate on your man. He’ll repay it with far more gratitude.”
“I don’t want gratitude,” she said. “It is just the Lady Bountiful idea that has annoyed me from the beginning. I want to feel one of a colossal family, that’s all; not to be the housekeeper in the store cupboard or a cow being milked.”
“Then you must put up with poor relations, and they’re always a damned nuisance,” said Cyril. “Your mother had a great love of humanity, she said, but her idea was more to be the head of a family of her own than to be mixed up in a general one. Gad! she used to rope them in, too! I never saw anything like it. And nothing about it of a grosser nature, like your friend Joseph. All pure, unadulterated love. It’s a wonderful gift.” He was lost in retrospect.
“Where have you wandered off to?” she asked in perplexity. “Mother had only two of us and you said once that she wasn’t in love with you. I have thought over that sometimes, and I think you must be wrong. I don’t mean to say you oughtn’t to have said it, because I don’t want nasty things covered up; I want them not to happen. But you were probably talking to the gallery that time, weren’t you? People forget. Evan forgot a lot of things that Chips remembered afterwards.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything at all nasty,” Cyril replied. “There’s nothing wrong with the instinct of the nesting season, and the number of eggs laid has nothing to do with it. The selection of a mate has also been sung by poets, so I have every right to use the comparison without being blamed by you. Chips is another of you loving ladies,” he went on. “That makes three of you. What a trio for one man to keep under the same roof! No wonder that I give way sometimes.”
“Chips loves the sun, with people thrown in as something that hatches out under it, I think,” said Teresa. “There’s not much actual family about it—though Ivor—goodness! You talk of birds! That is nothing to her. Do you know, I think she imagined she had hatched out the whole of creation at once when Ivor was born. And now she lives in him in a way, and doesn’t mind how independent he is. She never wants to hold on to him or push him this way or that, like some mothers do. She forgets so easily what other people think, so long as they don’t make obstacles and set them up in front of her.”