“But that is not the question now. What we are primarily concerned with—what was the object of Mrs. Aylmer’s visit—is to prevent a person for whom we have made ourselves answerable from spreading the infection of her own corruption to healthier households.”
The husband and wife were standing opposite to each other, but in their respective grace and ungrace, still in morning dress; a trivial irritation with her for making him late for dinner forming the warp of that annoyance of which her communication was the woof.
“Don’t you think that the whole thing is grossly exaggerated?” he asked with an accent where a lifelong habit of courtesy proved its value by helping him to an apparently quite good-tempered air of deference—“the pompous embassy, the inconsiderate breaking of your rules. No!”—recapitulation of his friend’s errors against good taste leavening the “sweet reasonableness” of his words with a perceptible indignation. “The whole way of setting about it was wrong, and not what I should have expected of an old friend like Mrs. Aylmer.”
“She was perfectly right,” rejoined Camilla, standing bolt upright under an electric burner, which made her look taller and scraggier than usual. “If a woman is granted the inestimable blessing of children, her first duty is to them, and besides——”
She paused. Should she tell him, as it was on the edge of her lips to do, what was the strict truth, that both the original idea of the indictment against Bonnybell and the vigour to carry it out had belonged to Catherine Aylmer and not to her mother? Should she or should she not? The neighbourhood was right. Catherine Aylmer would have made Edward a fit and congenial wife in the event of her own death, and Camilla was aware that her life was not a good one. The girl might still fill that office. Why, then, should the present tenant say anything calculated to prejudice Edward against her?
“Besides what?”
Mrs. Tancred had no powers of inventing, nor wish to invent, an altered utterance.
“I have thought better of what I was going to add,” she answered.
Silence followed. He had forgotten that she was making him late for dinner. All desire to check the flow of her communication had ceased, replaced by an awful curiosity for details.
“I suppose that they did not meet?”