"I? It's not for me to encourage Nan in anything. She doesn't need it. But as to marriage—yes, I think I wish she would do it, sometime, whenever she's ready. It would give her something she hasn't got; emotional steadiness, perhaps I mean. She squanders a bit, now. On the other hand, her writing would rather go to the wall; if she went on with it it would be against odds all the time."
"What's writing?" enquired Mrs. Hilary, with a snap of her finger and thumb. "Writing!"
As this seemed too vague or too large a question for Neville to answer, she did not try to do so, and Mrs. Hilary replied to it herself.
"Mere showing off," she explained it. "Throwing your paltry ideas at a world which doesn't want them. Writing like Nan's I mean. It's not as if she wrote really good books."
"Oh well. Who does that, after all? And what is a good book?" Here were two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew, seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens, which Neville let pass.
"Writing's just a thing to do, as I see it," Neville went on. "A job, like another. One must have a job, you know. Not for the money, but for the job's sake. And Nan enjoys it. But I daresay she'd enjoy marriage too."
"Does she love this man?"
"I don't know. I shouldn't be surprised. She hasn't told me so."
"Probably she doesn't, as he's single. Nan's so perverse. She will love the wrong men, always."
"You shouldn't believe all Rosalind tells you, mother. Rosalind has a too vivid fancy and a scandalous tongue."