“That’s very good of you,” he said slowly, “but er—the whole afternoon? Rather a fag, isn’t it? You could have a walk round after lunch, and we’d start at three.”
“Thanks, but it’s against my principles to divide good things. We’ll do Boxley next week, if you’ll give me the chance.”
The Squire looked at his wife again and smiled, a good-natured smile. He was obviously content that she should be amused, provided that he himself had no trouble in the matter.
“That’s all right, then,” he said. “We’ll leave it at that. Cass will be quite pleased to have someone to talk to. Won’t you, Cass?”
“Very pleased!” said Cassandra gravely. It was beyond her at that moment to make pretence, but the earnestness of her face had the effect of launching her husband on an old grievance.
“It’s your own fault, you know; your own fault! I’m always talking to you about it. She won’t make friends, Peignton! Lived within a couple of miles of Chumley all these years, and hasn’t a single friend. Says there’s no one to know. Rubbish! Don’t tell me... Lots of ’em, if she took the trouble to find out. Too proud, that’s the size of it, and they know it, and it gets ’em on the raw. She’s made herself jolly unpopular, that’s what she’s done. You can’t deny that you have made yourself unpopular!”
“I am quite the most unpopular woman in the neighbourhood,” Cassandra said, with the sideways tilt of the chin which Dane was beginning to recognise. “It’s humiliating, but I can’t see that I am to blame. I bore the Chumley people, and they bore me, and if I’m to be bored at all, I so very much prefer to do it for myself. I don’t complain of being alone.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Not in words, perhaps. There are a jolly lot of ways in which a woman can rub it in,” cried the Squire with a shrewdness at which Cassandra laughed with unruffled good-nature.
“Poor Bernard! Have I rubbed it in? Never mind! Grizel Beverley is going to prove a host in herself, and Captain Peignton is giving me a whole afternoon, and I’ve been at the church for over an hour, decorating, and talking prettily to the other helpers. Things are looking up. Who knows! I may be quite sociable by the end of another year!”
But the Squire refused to be cajoled.