“As for Mrs. Hamilton being a good mother,” went on Mrs. Milton, “she’s been one of the best. Her husband was a small solicitor and left them very badly off. It was she who screwed the money out of the housekeeping that Frank should go to Paris and study painting. Lucy, who was just as clever at music, had to teach herself. I do hope, now he is getting on, that Frank will make their lives easier.”
“You don’t like him?” said Claudia abruptly. There was a subtle something in Mrs. Milton’s tone that convinced her.
Mrs. Milton hesitated.
“You can speak quite honestly. Why not? You knew him for some years, did you not?”
“Yes, we lived next door to them in the High Street for years.... I think artists are always rather egotistical and selfish, don’t you? His mother adored him, and perhaps that doesn’t do a man any good. I want my boys to have happy memories of their youth and me, but I do try not to spoil them. I try and remember that they will be husbands to some nice girls later on. He always let her do all the giving ... one shouldn’t give too much, however much one loves. One should insist on some exchange, if only for the sake of the loved one.”
“And yet,” said Claudia, scrawling weird figures on the blotting-pad, “they say that the ideal love means self-sacrifice, that true happiness is to be found in giving.”
“But it isn’t an ideal world in which we live, is it?” said Mrs. Milton gently. “Isn’t that sometimes a form of selfishness? I know by experience with the children that it’s often the tempting path, ‘the easiest way,’ but if one really loves the little minds and hearts, one must sometimes bear the tears and the sulks that follow when you are firm. You’ll know that one day, when you have children of your own.”
“And with men and women?”
“Many women, I think, have made themselves and their men unhappy by giving too much and too freely. It’s become a habit with women. We can’t stand their frowns and their tempers. But I’m sure it’s a mistake. My husband is the dearest of men, but at the beginning of our life together I nearly became a doormat—just of my own accord.... Shall we fix on Miss Ronald?”
They worked steadily for half an hour, when there was a loud commotion on the stairs. It startled Margaret Milton, but Claudia knew the cause. Pat had lately acquired a huge puppy sheepdog, with the result that her arrival was always somewhat like that of a circus in full swing.