Mother and daughter! Bertram watched them as they talked together. How immensely different, yet how alike! Lady Ottery, with her rather awe-inspiring dignity, plainly, almost dowdily, dressed. Joyce, with absurd little bows on her night-dress, excited, thrusting off the bedclothes, stretching out for a cigarette, saying “Damn” when she dropped the match, laughing when her mother fastened up a little button which revealed too much, announcing her intention of having a tea-party for her “best boy,” careless of shocking this old-fashioned mother. Yet, Bertram thought, with the same steel, the same hardihood underneath her softness, and the same family tradition.
Lady Ottery directed her attention to Bertram for a moment, having previously ignored him. She disliked him, as he knew, disappointed with her daughter’s marriage to a penniless young officer, and suspicious of his political views after one or two heated conversations. This afternoon, however, she was unusually gracious, and remarked that he looked worried.
Joyce told her that he was always worrying. He was suffering from some soul complex, which she could not fathom—an uneasy conscience, or a craving for the Higher Life.
“Too much sick-room, I expect! Husbands always get the worst of this sort of thing. Ottery fretted unreasonably.”
She alluded to a lecture she was going to deliver in London, “The Religion of Revolution,” and trusted (that was her word) that Bertram would go to hear it. It would explain the cause of social unrest and might clear up some of his little difficulties.
Bertram took the ticket she gave him, and suppressed an inclination to groan or laugh. He could not imagine his “difficulties” being dissolved by anything that his mother-in-law might have to say.
“I expect I’m suffering from the strain of peace,” he said with a smile, when Lady Ottery fixed him with her lorgnette and said he looked “hipped.”
“London’s enough to depress a laughing hyena! But I’ll take a walk in it while you and Joyce have a private chat. I expect she’s heaps to tell you.”
Joyce said she had nothing to tell. She wanted her mother to give her the latest social news, the inside of the political situation, and the state of the world generally. Was the Prime Minister still licking the hands of Labour? Had Evelyn got her divorce yet?