“I should like to ask Peignton and his fiancée to dinner,” Martin said, and Grizel nodded obediently, and said:
“Then we must have roast fowl! Roast fowl, I’ve discovered, is the fatted calf of the middle classes. Whenever I tell Cook that a friend is coming, she says: ‘A fowl, I suppose, mum. Three-and-three, or three-and-six?’ I always say three-and-three, and feel virtuous for the rest of the day. If it’s three-and-three, there’s just breast enough for ‘the room’; the extra threepence leaves a picking for the kitchen. Cook says it’s cheaper ‘in the end’ to give the three-and-six, but I take no notice. Sometimes I suspect the poulterer of a dark design, and believe that there’s no difference at all! The extra threepence is just a trap for the unwary. However! ... enough of these details. Certainly we’ll ask them if you wish it. And who else? We can’t contend with them alone all night long. I adore lovers in theory, but I object to feeling de trop in my own house. If we were a partie carrée they would expect me to have an important letter to write for the early post, and you to come with me to look over my shoulder. No, you don’t! We’ll have a crowd, and let them realise from the first that there’s no chance of a quiet moment. Who else?”
Martin deliberated.
“The Raynors? They’ve been fairly intimate...”
“Certainly not. I must reserve Cassandra to help me later on when we tackle the formidables. This shall be a lively, informal affair, got up in a hurry to wish them luck. Quite a short invitation, the shorter the better. Young people for choice—cheery, and fond of roast fowl. Mary Mallison for one.”
“Because she is young and cheery?”
“It doesn’t matter a bit. She is going to be asked,” maintained Grizel, with that characteristic inconsequence which she had the power to turn into the most charming of attributes. “She shall have the nicest partner, and the best place, and the merrythought all to herself. I’m so sorry for Mary Mallisons. There are such a horde of them, and nobody wants them, and they don’t want themselves, and it’s all so wrong and wasteful and piteous, and I never see one of them, and look into her poor, starved little face that I don’t say to myself with a shudder, ‘Suppose that was me?’”
Martin smiled at her adoringly.
“Oh! but it isn’t, and it never by any possibility could have been. Besides, don’t you think it’s their own fault? You were twenty-eight when we were married, and you had lived alone with a cross old aunt. You might easily have turned into a Mary Mallison yourself, if you had so little spirit as to allow yourself to be starved. Even if you had never married, can you imagine yourself sinking into a depth of apathy and indifference? There’s something contemptible about it. An unmarried woman has such wide possibilities. There is so much work waiting for her to do.”
“If she is allowed to do it! But what if there is a chain around her neck, in the shape of some relation who thinks that her work is to be an understudy at home? What would Mrs Mallison have to say to wide possibilities, while she wants a daughter to run messages and arrange the flowers? What would you have said in the days when you needed Katrine, if she had talked of her life’s work? Her work was obviously to darn your socks until such time as you found someone else whom you liked better, when—pouf!”—she snapped her fingers—“enough of Katrine! Let her go out into the wilds, and see what she can find!”