The Gainsboroughs were habitually early risers. At half-past nine they generally parted for the day; the Principal to his principalling, his wife to the kitchen, fortified by renewed hope of Annie being able to cook something really nice to-day; Emma to the grimy back street where she had her office. It had been late when they reached home after the Prices’ party, and Mrs. Gainsborough’s inevitable question, “Would you like anything, dear, before you go to bed?” was known to the other two to offer no inducement to sitting up; no one can talk over a feast on digestive biscuits and water. The three bedroom doors were shut within ten minutes after the cab had rattled away down the street and not a sound was heard in the big house except faint snoring from the top floor and the ticking of the grandfather clock on the landing below. Emma got into bed and heard the clock gather itself together with a hoarse rattle and strike one; four church clocks answered it a minute later. The trams had stopped and the road was so silent that a policeman’s footstep was heard all up the street that lay behind the house, round the corner and down past Emma’s window almost to the end of the Square. “Certainly not! Certainly not!” Emma imagined the footsteps saying, and her heart warmed to the image of faithful Robert, patient and decorous, with order as his means of subsistence and disorder his only hope of pleasure in the monotonous hours. “Certainly not. Certainly not.” The clocks chimed two strokes and then one; half-past one. Robert was coming back. Cats began to quarrel in the sooty flower beds of the Square; scuffled, spat, shrieked and vanished. Emma thought harshly of them and gradually dozed. The silence was broken by a sudden uproar in the street at the back, near the corner of Robert’s beat, where rows of mean little houses led down to one of the railway stations. There were loud sounds of quarrelling, a woman’s voice and two or three men; a splintering of glass, a scream, grumbling, threats and oaths and then—“Certainly not. Certainly not.” Robert was coming back.
“’Ere, what’s this?” she imagined he would say when he reached the corner, but all was silent before he had passed the Square, and any hope of incident for that night faded away as the clock struck two and the rain began to fall gently. Emma was wide awake now and lay for some time thinking of her work with the hopelessness of a tired body and mind. Robert probably never suffered in this way. If he got in the dumps he took something for it, “an’ as for that lot up there,” he would have said, pointing a thumb up the poverty-stricken scene of the quarrel, “the sooner they was all turned out the better.” Mrs. Robert probably understood more than he did about the discouraging habits of matter, which collects again as soon as it is displaced. Teresa’s dreams were busy with other plans for settling the difficulty. She wanted to build up the whole mess into a work of art.
The Gainsboroughs had their deferred talk about the Prices’ party at breakfast next morning.
“Joseph Price is a perfect ass,” said Emma. “And yet you can’t be as angry with him as he makes you. I want first to slap him and then to turn him right side up again and put him back in his chair.”
“No, I think he is really dreadful,” said her mother. “He always was a tiresome little boy, but Cambridge seems to have done him more harm than good. I can’t think where he gets that silly way of speaking. It is more like Oxford if anything, but it isn’t that either. I wouldn’t libel the poor things.”
“It is a sort of culture and climbing mixed,” said Emma. “Don’t you remember when the Mortons came down here to open the Industries? Some of them talked exactly like that, only it wasn’t so obvious because it must have been longer since they did it on purpose. It is almost natural to lots of people I am sure. But Joseph Price was very busy with it then. ‘Voilà que j’arrive!’ his whole face said.”
“It was a splendid supper,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “I only wish I could teach Annie to make quenelles like that. I think she must make ours too soft. They always have that curious squashy tastelessness about them, or else too much pepper.”
“My dear Beatrice, you’ll never do anything with that woman, so long as you live,” said the Principal. He tossed a piece of kidney on his plate. “Look at that! Leathery, dry—a kidney ought to be a dream of tenderness and blood, just poised—poised, mind, so that the juices soak through—on a piece of toast, neither hard nor soft, browned to a turn——”
“Oh, Father,” interrupted his daughter, “do please talk of something else. You make me dribble with envy; I can’t bear it.”
“Poor darlings!” murmured the mother, compassionate almost to tears. “It is hard on you. I really will speak to her and see if she wouldn’t care to go to Mrs. Plumtre; I know they don’t care what they eat. I’m not sure even that they’re not vegetarians.”