“Very well, we’ll try again,” she said patiently. “I must make you understand somehow. We’ll take Mother. She was devoted to us and she loves babies as she only sees clean ones. Suppose she lived in a slum and had half-a-dozen of them squalling and screaming and covered with every sort of hideous filth and was kept awake all night and saw them being hungry and ill and cold. Just think what a tremendous sort of love she would need to have to make her go on with it; and how honest she would have to be not to steal for them; and how unselfish to go hungry so that they might have what food there was, and how patient not to grumble and scold. You need a super quality of every good point in a character in order to keep up at all. You can’t say that being used to horrors takes away all the merit of enduring them with real style like you see sometimes down there.
“No, not all,” said Cyril, “but then, Dicky, you must be fair. Lots of things that I find very hard to bear, such as—no, I won’t go into them; you are too tender-hearted and I don’t want to add to your worries. But I assure you I am a very noble fellow in my way though nothing I have to put up with would rouse any sympathy in your fog-bound heroes.”
Teresa looked at him anxiously, critical and questioning.
“I am only trying to cheer you up, dear,” he assured her. “I have a very tidy mind—untidiness at the office is one of the things that I was going to mention just now—and I dislike arguing in a circle. That is where Emma is more suited to her job than you are. She never stands about and says, ‘Yes, but on the other hand——’ or, ‘what can we do, because every way you look at it it doesn’t make sense?’ She plugs along as busy as a bee, fitting splints on to one and a flannel petticoat and a book of poetry on to another and doesn’t wear herself out in guessing whether the creatures are angels or devils. Dicky, my dear, you are twenty-five and you are missing everything that you have been looking for and that you haven’t found. You have said that you only got past one fog into another and that you want to give what you have to starving people who need it. What about David?”
“I do want so dreadfully to marry him,” said Teresa after some hesitation. “But I am sure it is selfish. He won’t do what I want and what would make it all right.”
“What won’t he do?”
“Sell the place and give the money to the work Emma is doing. It wouldn’t make much difference, I know, but it would take a few hundred children out of the mud and I should feel I had done my best.”
“You would do much more good by keeping those damned Prices out of Aldwych. You never saw such a mess as they are making of it. It is perfectly beastly. Enough to make the old man turn in his grave.”
“But it is the wrong way to live,” she persisted. “I have no right to glide into beautiful things and comfort that I haven’t earned.”
“Well, look here. You’re pretty comfortable to start with, aren’t you? Your mother and I saw to that. She especially. She married me because she wanted a child and like a good careful bird she chose the downiest nesting-place she could find for the benefit of her young.”