Then her reflections took a graver turn. If it were possible to avoid it, she must not be turned out of Stillington, as she had been—however poor, good-natured old Felicity might try to gloss it over—turned out of Hill Street. To avoid this undesirable result, one of the first and most urgent postulates was to ascertain, with the least possible delay, what topics of conversation were permissible and what tabooed in this extraordinary atmosphere of Puritanism and prudery. If she could make a friend of Edward, and quietly put her case before him? She dismissed the suggestion with a shrug. “If you try to make a friend of a man, he tries to kiss you!” This was a syllogism whose accuracy she had never had any reason to doubt. Valuable as enlightenment from a person who had had fifteen years’ intimate experience of Camilla would be, it was therefore wiser to abstain from seeking it, and to work out the problem by one’s own individual lights.
With elbows propped on the old chintz-covered arms of her chair, and eyes exploring the fiery caves of a grate as generously roomy as that chair, Miss Ransome made pass in carefully scanned procession before her mind’s eye the topics likely to present themselves on the morrow, sifting and winnowing the few thoroughly sound ones from among the wilderness of subjects likely, apparently, if treated with the ease and freedom which came natural to her, to lead to her speedy expulsion. “Felicity and Tom? H’m! doubtful. Felicity safe enough; but Tom?”
A process of elimination, conducted with a strictness of which this first beginning was an example, ended by leaving only three themes upon which the seal of complete security could be set—the weather, the contents of the newspapers, with the exception of the Divorce Court, and Jock. Even in his case a rider had to be added, that under no circumstances was he to lead up to reminiscences of Mimi. But of the innumerable multitude of the tabooed, a trio were four-lined and three-starred. ‘Claire,’ her own past: especially anything referring to her education, and the demi-monde en bloc.
Having completed, at a late hour of the night, these dispositions for her future guidance, she betook herself to a high, wide, and admirable bed, while still sighing for a cigarette, and vainly hunting for sandwiches and whisky and soda.
If Bonnybell’s conversational infelicities had disquieted herself, they had produced a certainly not inferior effect upon one at least—and the most important—of her two auditors. It was not often that Camilla reappeared after retiring for the night, but the occasion was one worthy of the exceptional, and Edward was not much surprised by her advent in the smoking-room shortly after he had assumed his smoking-jacket, and established himself in his accustomed surroundings, to face a problem almost as difficult as that which was engaging Miss Ransome’s attention upstairs. He had rather that his wife had not broken through her usual habits, having a dim feeling that he was not ready to cope with her, and a less dim impression that her déshabillé was unnecessarily unbecoming.
Camilla was not one of the women who are coquettish with their husbands, nor did she use any of the little pardonable juggles often indulged in by women who have wedded men greatly their juniors. Rather did she seem determined to underline and dash the fifteen all too obvious years that parted her from Edward. In the early days of their married life he had been wont gently to remonstrate, but it was now long since the hair, ruthlessly torn back from the already too high and bare forehead, and the tasteless, laceless woollen wrapper, had found and left him anything but silent and acquiescent.
To-night, the forehead seemed more naked and the peignoir woollier and drabber than usual. Mrs. Tancred did not sit down. Evidently no ease of posture could beseem such a crisis.
“What have we done? or rather what has Felicity done for us?”
He had risen, with habitual politeness, at her entrance.
“Is she worse than you expected?”