“He’s not bitter,” said Eddy. “He’s very gentle. Only he disbelieves in it as a means of progress.”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Oliver, “he married one of Lord Ulverstone’s daughters—Dorothy, wasn’t it.” (Lord Ulverstone and Mrs. Oliver’s family were both of Westmorland, where there is strong clannish feeling.)
“He and Dorothy don’t seem to be hitting it off, do they,” put in Daphne, and her mother said, “Daphne, dear,” and changed the subject. Daphne ought not, by good rights, to have heard that about Hugh Datcherd being ill and alone, and Mrs. Le Moine going to him.
“She’s a trying woman, I fancy,” said Eddy, who did not mean to be tactless, but had been absorbed in his own thoughts and had got left behind when his mother started a new subject. “Hard, and selfish, and extravagant, and thinks of nothing but amusing herself, and doesn’t care a hang for any of Datcherd’s schemes, or for Datcherd himself, for that matter. She just goes off and leaves him to be ill by himself. He nearly died last year; he was awfully cut up, too, about their little girl dying—she was the only child, and Datcherd was absolutely devoted to her, and I believe her mother neglected her when she was ill, just as she does Datcherd.”
“These stories get exaggerated, of course,” said Mrs. Oliver, because Lady Dorothy was one of the Westmorland Ulverstones, because Daphne was listening, and because she suspected the source of the stories to be Eileen Le Moine.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt there’s her side of it, too, if one knew it,” admitted Eddy, ready, as usual, to see everyone’s point of view. “It would be a frightful bore being married to a man who was interested in all the things you hated most, and gave his whole time and money and energy to them. But anyhow, you see why his friends, and particularly Eileen, who’s his greatest friend, feel responsible for him.”
“A very sad state of things,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Anyhow,” said Daphne, “here’s the pony-trap.”
Eileen came downstairs, hand-in-hand with Jane, and said goodbye to the Dean, and Mrs. Oliver, and Daphne, and “Thank you so much for having me,” and drove off with Eddy and Jane, still with that look of troubled wistfulness in her face.