Lady Ottery had given Bertram a wintery smile, and permitted him to kiss her cheek. He felt as though he had kissed one of the marble pillars in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“A sharp frost last night,” she said, and as this statement didn’t call for much of an answer, she seemed to forget his presence, and engaged Alban in an argument on the subject of Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs, newly published, of which she disapproved strongly.
“An outrage!” was her opinion, and she also believed they would be used as propaganda by radicals who desired to destroy society, and delighted in all such revelations of corruption in high places.
“It seems to me an extremely witty, harmless, and entertaining book, Mother,” said Alban. “My only regret is that it contains such little scandal. Think of all the things she might have written!”
“If we must have scandals, let us keep them to ourselves, my dear,” said Lady Ottery, firmly. “In my young days we hushed up anything that might prejudice our position in the public mind.”
“Most dishonest!” said Alban lightly.
“What do you think, Ottery?” asked Bertram’s mother-in-law.
“Entirely as you do, my dear,” said Lord Ottery, somewhat vaguely, having been thinking, perhaps, of The Black Death.
Bertram expressed an opinion upon Mrs. Asquith’s portraits of “The Souls.” He thought it would be quoted centuries hence as a picture of English life in the ’eighties. His opinion did not seem to impress his wife’s family or Joyce. There was no reply to his remark, and Alban switched off the conversation to the character of his new terrier—a cunning little devil with a hell of a lot of pluck.
“Doing anything special this afternoon, Joyce?” asked Bertram, towards the end of this meal which had been a silent one for him.