“Our dear Dreda, as usual, finds preaching easier than practice. You see, my dear, when it comes to the point, you are not a bit more resigned than I am myself. It’s worse for me to give up all the fun of my first season than for you to stay at home instead of going to school; the only difference is that I have sense enough to realise what is before me, while you are so taken up with sentiment and—”
“Oh, shut up, girls! Stop wrangling, for pity’s sake!” cried Hereward, impatiently. “Things are bad enough as they are, without making them worse. If you are going to nag, we’ll go downstairs and leave you to yourselves. It’s such bad form to kick up a fuss; but girls are all alike. You wouldn’t find a boy going on like that—”
Rowena turned upon him with wide, challenging eyes.
“Wouldn’t I? Are you so sure? Suppose father were to tell you to-morrow that you couldn’t be a soldier, but must go into an office and try to earn money for yourself... Suppose he took you away from Eton, Gurth, and sent you to a cheap school! How would you like that?”
Silence... The two lads sat staring into the fire with dogged faces. They scorned to cry aloud, but the horror of the prospect had for a moment a so paralysing effect that they could not reply. Leave Sandhurst in the middle of one’s course, and become—a clerk! Leave Eton and the fellows, and go to one of those miserable, second-rate shows which all good Etonians regarded with ineffable contempt! Was it possible to suffer such degradation and live?
Rowena was touched to compunction by the sight of the stricken faces, for though at the moment the worst side of her character was in the ascendant, she was by no means hard-hearted, and, moreover, Hereward was her especial friend and companion. She laughed again, and gave an impatient shrug to her shoulders.
“Oh, don’t be afraid ... He never will! Whatever happens, nothing will be allowed to interfere with ‘the boys’ and their careers! We shall all pinch and screw and live on twopence-halfpenny a week, so as to be able to pay your bills. It’s always the same story. Everything is sacrificed for the sons.”
“Quite right, too,” maintained the eldest son, stoutly. “How are you going to keep up the honour of a family if you don’t give the boys a chance? It doesn’t matter a fig whether a girl is educated or not, so long as she can read and write. She’ll marry, of course, and then she has nothing to do but add up the bills.”
At this truly masculine distinction, Rowena and Dreda tossed scornful heads and rolled indignant eyes to the ceiling.
“I shall never marry!” announced the former, thinking ruefully of the bare countryside, with never a house of consequence within a radius of miles ... “I am a suffragette. I believe in the high, lofty mission of women!” cried the second, who had been converted to the movement the day before by the sight of some sketches in the Daily Graphic. Only nine-year-old Maud sniffed, and opined, “I shall marry a lord! Then he’ll have lots of money, and I’ll give it to father, and we’ll live happily ever after.”