“I only repeat the tale that was told me,” replied Camilla, with frosty impartiality. “She was overheard inoculating Meg with one of the worst of the current scandals of the day, dilating—no”—correcting herself with characteristic honesty—“there perhaps I am inexact; she probably had not time to dilate, but telling her how Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of ‘Waddy.’”
An odious inclination to vexed laughter assailed Edward: firstly at the ugly piquancy of the imputed criminal utterance as proceeding from such almost infantile lips, and secondly at the disproportion of such a pomp of disapproval as was implied by the “indignation meeting” alluded to. But the laughter impulse was a mere muscular contortion, and the annoyance killed it dead before he found words to comment on the charge. The accusation was grotesque—with the criminal’s antecedents, what else could they have expected?—but the peep given by it into her mind and its furniture hurt him all the same. The whole business, with its unnecessary parade and fuss, was a storm in a tea-cup, and yet it might have far-reaching consequences for the poor little culprit, and it was he that would have brought them on her. He knew that he ought to express abhorrence at the offence committed, and that the article which issued from the warehouse of his jaded mind was not the one expected.
“It is I that am to blame,” he said, a sharp self-reproach piercing through the natural languor of his tones. “I ought not to have introduced her to them; she had no wish for it.”
“She need not fear a repetition of the experience,” returned Camilla, folding her arms in that wrapper which she had assumed, having snatched ten minutes from the bare half-hour which she dedicated to dressing for dinner, in order to make an irruption with her Evangel into her husband’s quarters.
To Edward’s eye and mind that snuff-coloured peignoir had something in common with the judge’s black cap. His wife seemed always to assume it when she pronounced sentence of death. Was she going to pronounce one now? If there was any chance of averting it, that chance would not lie in the direction of a too eager partisanship on his own part.
“You must remember,” he said with a cool gentleness of reminder, “that when you undertook this task you braced yourself to the making of discoveries that would more surprise than please you.”
“That is true,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “If you had asked me, I should have told you that I was prepared for anything—bad habits, objectionable phrases, idleness, ignorance—her ignorance is stupendous.”
“I am sure it is.”
“I put her through a few elementary questions upon English history this morning. There were not many facts that she was sure of, but she was quite sure that King Richard II. had married Philippa of Hainault. I tried to explain to her that in the fourteenth century men did not marry their grandmothers, although it has become a very common practice to-day.”
The shaft went home, as it was intended. What had he done to deserve it? Did she suspect him of an intention, by servile acquiescence in her subsidiary charges, to lead her away from the main point at issue?