He owed it, however, to the impression made upon her mind by his reticence, that he could tell more about these strangers if he would, that Lucy almost invited his attendance on part of her way home.
“I will walk with you as far as our paths lie together,” she said, as she met him at the door of her cookery school; and he turned with her, well content, though he had not intended to walk that way. Was Lucy coming round to a sense of his excellencies? he asked himself. It seemed “just like” one of the usual aggravating ways of Providence, that this should come, just as he began to feel a new interest stealing into his mind.
“Our paths lie together, as far as you will permit,” he said, tempering however the largeness of this speech by a prudent limit. “I should like nothing better than to walk up the avenue with you this beautiful afternoon.”
“Oh no, don’t take that trouble;” said Lucy. She wanted to question him, but she did not want so much of him as that; while on the other hand, he, though conscious of the rising of a new interest, would on no account have done anything to spoil his chance with Lucy, had she shown the slightest appearance of turning favourable eyes on him. Whatever divergencies of sentiment there might be, Bertie knew well, without any foolishness, which was the right thing to do.
“How good of you to take so much pains with all these children,” he said. “Will they be really the better for it, I wonder? The cooking looked very nice; but will their fathers’ dinners be the better?”
“Their fathers are prejudiced—and perhaps their mothers too. It is their husbands and their mistresses who will be the better. We must always consent to lose a generation,” said Lucy, with youthful prudence. And he smiled. It was, perhaps, scarcely possible not to smile.
“Then if my uncle agreed with you,” he said, “and the rest of us—the girls who are learning to broil and stew in your schools would make nice dinners for the boys, who never would have been allowed to have a glass of beer in the ‘Curtis Arms,’ and then the old generation once swept away, all would go well.”
“Why not?” said Lucy; “but I do not wish to touch the old generation, if not for good, certainly not for evil. I would not sweep them away, but I don’t hope to do much with them. Even the like of you and me,” she said, with meaning, “though we are not old yet, are too old to take up with a new order of things. But, Cousin Bertie, it was something else I meant to say to you. I am not in a flutter of curiosity, like poor dear old Julia; but—you know something more about these ladies, I could see, than what you told us, at least.”
“These ladies! what ladies?” he cried, a little confused by the question.
“The new people—at Wren Cottage; Mrs.—Arthur, I think you call her.”