He returned to the fire and drew up a chair. “I’m in favour of marriage for all, myself,” he went on, “young and old, rich and poor, never mind the reason, but get on with the event itself. The advent of little ones is, after all, the only thing that matters, as your mother explained to me. And that was you, Chips. There was a devil of a row before you turned up.”
“Oh, did you and Mother quarrel?” she asked, very much surprised.
“You can’t call a one-sided thing exactly a quarrel,” he said. “No one but a man could quarrel with me.”
“Couldn’t they?” she asked.
“No. But your mother is very powerful in the way I was describing;——”
Susie came in just then. Cyril had told her while they were dressing that Evan had “put in a claim as consort for Chips; which just bears out what I said this style of architecture would lead to when we came; except that he isn’t wealthy. In fact, he has very little except his pay.”
Susie took the line that this was “all that could be expected in a place where people think so much of money that they never leave their offices till it is time to go to bed.”
“That ought to make them all the more anxious to marry,” he remarked, “or else how can they enjoy any intellectual conversation?”
“Of course you will twist everything I say to a coarse standpoint, Cyril,” she said, “because those sort of cheap jokes are so easy to make.”
“Where’s the joke?” he asked, putting on his coat. “‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ as the leaders of taste remind us.”