“I think it’s... Mothers!” volunteered Cassandra illuminatingly. “Poor ones. They have plain sewing and coal clubs. I subscribe. You were invited to join the Committee. In the parish room. They—I believe they cut out the plain clothes.”
“Fancy me cutting out plain clothes!” cried Grizel, and gave a complacent pat to her lace gown. “I’ll subscribe too, and stay at home, but I’ll apologise to the dear old thing. She meant to be kind, and I’m sorry I shocked her. I’m going to ring for fresh tea, and we can have a nice talk, and shock each other comfortably. Have you any children?”
“I have a son,” said Cassandra. The brilliance of her smile faded as she spoke. She was conscious of it herself and laboriously endeavoured to keep her voice unchanged. “He is nine years old. At a preparatory school. Quite a big person.”
Grizel also ceased to smile. There was an expression akin to reverence in the hazel eyes as they dwelt on the other’s face. The deep note was in her voice.
“You look so young, just a girl, and you have a son nearly ten! Old enough to be a companion,—to talk with you, and to understand. How wonderful it must be!”
There was a moment of silence during which Cassandra’s thoughts flew back to those never-to-be-forgotten days when a tiny form lay elapsed to a heart overflowing with the glory of motherhood, and then reproduced before her a stocky figure in an Eton suit, with a stolid, freckled face. She smiled with stiff lips.
“He is a dear thing, quite clever too, which is satisfactory. You must see him in the holidays, but unless you can talk cricket I’m afraid he may bore you. It is not, of course, a responsive age.”
“It will come! It will come! It’s storing up. These undemonstrative natures are the richest deep down,” Grizel said softly.
The maid came in with the tea at that moment, and she said no more, but it was enough. Cassandra felt an amazed conviction that if she had spoken for hours, the situation could not have been more accurately understood.
Grizel poured out tea, talking easily the while.