"Don't be so sure. Anyway you as a magistrate can keep the police up to the mark."
Winnington departed, and his old friend was left to meditate on his predicament. It was strange to see Mark Winnington, with his traditional, English ways and feelings—carried, as she always felt, to their highest—thus face to face with the new feminist forces—as embodied in Delia Blanchflower. He had resented, clearly resented, the introduction—by her, Madeleine—of the sex element into the problem. But how difficult to keep it out! "He will see her constantly—he will have to exercise his will against hers—he will get his way—and then hate himself for conquering—he will disapprove, and yet admire,—will offend her, yet want to please her—a creature all fire, and beauty, and heroisms out of place! And she—could she, could I, could any woman I know, fight Mark Winnington—and not love him all the time? Men are men, and women are women—in spite of all these 'isms,' and 'causes.' I bet—but I don't know what I bet!—" Then her thoughts gradually veered away from Mark to quite another person.
How would Susan Amberley be affected by this new interest in Mark Winnington's life? Madeleine's thoughts recalled a gentle face, a pair of honest eyes, a bearing timid and yet dignified. So she was teaching one of Mark's crippled children? And Mark thought no doubt she would have done the like for anyone else with a charitable hobby? Perhaps she would, for her heart was a fount of pity. All the same, the man—blind bat!—understood nothing. No fault of his perhaps; but Lady Tonbridge felt a woman's angry sympathy with a form of waste so common and so costly.
And now the modest worshipper must see her hero absorbed day by day, and hour by hour, in the doings of a dazzling and magnificent creature like Delia Blanchflower. What food for torment, even in the meekest spirit!
So that the last word the vivacious woman said to herself was a soft "Poor Susy!" dropped into the heart of a September rose as she stooped to gather it.
Chapter VII
A small expectant party were gathered for afternoon tea in the book-lined sitting-room—the house possessed no proper drawing-room—of Bridge End. Mrs. Matheson indeed, Mark's widowed sister, would have resented it had anyone used the word "party" in its social sense. Miss Blanchflower's father had been dead scarcely a month; and Mrs. Matheson in her quiet way, held strongly by all the decencies of life. It was merely a small gathering of some of the oldest friends and neighbours of Miss Blanchflower's family—those who had stood nearest to her grandparents—to welcome the orphan girl among them. Lady Tonbridge—of whom it was commonly believed, though no one exactly knew why, that Bob Blanchflower, as a youth had been in love with her, before ever he met his Greek wife; Dr. France, who had attended both the old people till their deaths, and had been much beloved by them; his wife; the Rector, Mrs. Amberley, and Susy:—Mrs. Matheson had not intended to ask anyone else. But the Andrews' had asked themselves, and she had not had the moral courage to tell them that the occasion was not for them. She was always getting Mark into difficulties, she penitently reflected, by her inability to say No, at the right time, and with the proper force, Mark could always say it, and stick to it smiling—without giving offence.
Mrs. Matheson was at the tea-table. She was tall and thin, with something of her brother's good looks, but none of his over-flowing vitality. Her iron-grey hair was rolled back from her forehead; she wore a black dress with a high collar of white lawn, and long white cuffs. Little Mrs. Amberley, the Rector's wife, sitting beside her, envied her hostess her figure, and her long slender neck. She herself had long since parted with any semblance of a waist, and the boned collars of the day were a perpetual torment to one whose neck, from the dressmaker's point of view, scarcely existed. But Mrs. Amberley endured them, because they were the fashion; and to be moderately in the fashion meant simply keeping up to the mark—not falling behind. It was like going to church—an acceptance of that "general will," which according to the philosophers, is the guardian of all religion and all morality.
The Rector too, who was now handing the tea-cake, believed in fashion—ecclesiastical fashion. Like his wife, he was gentle and ineffective. His clerical dress expressed a moderate Anglicanism, and his opinions were those of his class and neighbourhood, put for him day by day in his favourite newspaper, with a cogency at which he marvelled. Yet he was no more a hypocrite than his wife, and below his common-places both of manner and thought there lay warm feelings and a quick conscience. He was just now much troubled about his daughter Susy. The night before she had told her mother and him that she wished to go to London, to train for nursing. It had been an upheaval in their quiet household. Why should she dream of such a thing? How could they ever get on without her? Who would copy out his sermons, or help with the schools? And her mother—so dependent on her only daughter! The Rector's mind was much disturbed, and he was accordingly more absent and more ineffective than usual.
Susy herself, in a white frock, with touches of blue at her waist, and in her shady hat, was moving about with cups of tea, taking that place of Mrs. Matthews's lieutenant, which was always tacitly given her by Winnington and his sister on festal occasions at Bridge End. As she passed Winnington, who had been captured by Mrs. Andrews, he turned with alacrity—