“Ah! that’s what you think—the usual reply. For Geoffrey Iverson I have no particular dislike—he has been the cat’s-paw of a clever and unscrupulous woman. His family is a very good one. She would have spoilt any man who had the misfortune to be married to her. Why, Sybil Iverson is notorious!”
“Claudia is quite unlike her in every way. Why, she is not even like her in appearance.”
Lady Currey lifted her thin, fair eyebrows. It was unbecoming that she should tell him the scandalous rumours that floated about respecting Claudia’s parentage: Such things could only be told by a father to a son. She vehemently disapproved of any plain speaking between the sexes. Such a crime could never be laid to her charge; not even in the marital chamber had she ever discussed any such thing.
“She is the daughter of her mother, Gilbert, and the mother—I say it deliberately—is a bad woman, a woman who has trailed the glory and purity of the flower of womanhood in the dust.” Lady Currey occasionally indulged in such flights of rhetoric. She had rehearsed this in the train.
“I don’t think the two women see much of one another.” Gilbert was a little nettled. “Claudia told me herself that she hardly knew her mother at all in her young days. She was left entirely to her governesses. She can hardly have imbibed any—any idea from her mother.”
The pathos of such an admission did not strike Lady Currey, it only helped to justify her present attitude.
“It is, of course, very painful for me to have to mention such matters to you, but why has she seen so little of her mother? Because Sybil was—I blush to say it—so surrounded by lovers that she neglected her maternal duties. I say again, she is notorious for her lax life and morals. Don’t you believe in heredity, Gilbert? Think of the blood that runs in that girl’s veins.”
Gilbert frowned. “Heredity is a curious thing. Not worth worrying over, I think. I don’t profess to understand it.”
“I have studied the question.” She had read one book that was quite out of date. “I firmly believe in heredity. The vices or the virtues of the father and mother are surely transmitted to the children.” It was pleasing to think that only virtues could be transmitted to Gilbert, but it was all the more annoying that those inherited virtues should be linked with the vices of Sybil Iverson’s child.