Mrs. Denison said kindly, “I think I should tell your people straight out that you can’t. It’s a tiresome little jar, I know, but honestly, I don’t believe it’s a bit of use members of a family pretending that they see life from the same angle when they don’t.”
Eddy said, “Oh, but I think we do, in a way. Only——”
It was really rather difficult to explain. He did indeed see life from the same angle as the rest of his family, but from many other angles as well, which was confusing. The question was, could one select some one thing to be, clergyman or anything else, unless one was very sure that it implied no negations, no exclusions of the other angles? That was, perhaps, what his life in Southwark would teach him. Most of the clergy round his own home—and, his father being a Dean, he knew many—hadn’t, it seemed to him, learnt the art of acceptance; they kept drawing lines, making sheep and goat divisions, like the Denisons.
The Hall man, feeling a little embarrassed because they were getting rather intimate and personal, and probably would like to get more so if he were not there, went away. He had had to call on the Denisons, but they weren’t his sort, he knew. Miss Denison and her parents frightened him, and he didn’t get on with girls who dressed artistically, or wrote poetry, and Arnold Denison was a conceited crank, of course. Oliver was a good sort, only very thick with Denison for some reason. If he was Oliver, and wanted to do anything so dull as slumming with parsons in Southwark, he wouldn’t be put off by anything the Denisons said.
“Why don’t you get your tie to match your socks, Eddy?” Arnold asked, with a yawn, when Egerton had gone.
His mother, a hospitable lady, and kind to Egertons and all others who came to her house, told him not to be disagreeable. Eddy said, truly, that he wished he did, and that it was a capital idea and looked charming.
“Egertons do look rather charming, quite often,” Margery conceded. “I suppose that’s something after all.”
Mrs. Denison added, (exquisite herself, she had a taste for neatness): “Their hair and their clothes are always beautifully brushed; which is more than yours are, Arnold.”
Arnold lay back with his eyes shut, and groaned gently. Egerton had fatigued him very much.
Eddy thought it was rather nice of Mrs. Denison and Margery to be kind about Egerton because he had been to tea. He realised that he himself was the only person there who was neither kind nor unkind about Egerton, because he really liked him. This the Denisons would have hopelessly failed to understand, or, probably, to believe; if he had mentioned it they would have thought he was being kind, too. Eddy liked a number of people who were ranked by the Denisons among the goats; even the rowing men of his own college, which happened to be a college where one didn’t row.