“I see. Then it’s most important that she should. What can I do about it?”
“Oh, just be pleasant, and make yourself as entertaining as you can, and pretend to be fairly sensible and intelligent.... She wouldn’t like it if she thought you were, well, a socialist, or an anarchist, or a person who was trying to do something and couldn’t, like people who try and get plays taken; or if I was a suffragette. She thinks people oughtn’t to be like that, because they don’t get on. And, too, she likes very much to be amused. You’ll be all right, of course.”
“Sure to be. I’m such a worldly success. Well, I shall haunt her doorstep whether she likes me or not.”
“If she dared not to,” said Molly indignantly, “I should walk straight out of her house and never go into it again, and make Nevill take me into his rooms instead. I should jolly well think she would like you!”
CHAPTER XII.
HYDE PARK TERRACE.
FORTUNATELY Mrs. Crawford did like Eddy (he presumed, therefore, that she did not know he was a socialist and a suffragist, and had tried to do many things he couldn’t), so Molly did not have to walk out of the house. He liked her too, and went to her house very frequently. She was pretty and clever and frankly worldly, and had a sweet trailing voice, a graceful figure, and two daughters just out, one of whom was engaged already to a young man in the Foreign Office.
She told Molly, “I like your young man, dear; he has pleasant manners, and seems to appreciate me,” and asked him to come to the house as often as he could. Eddy did so. He came to lunch and dinner, and met pleasant, polite, well-dressed people. (You had to be rather well-dressed at the Crawfords’: they expected it, as so many others do, with what varying degrees of fulfilment!) It is, of course, as may before have been remarked in these pages, exceedingly important to dress well. Eddy knew this, having been well brought up, and did dress as well as accorded with his station and his duties. He quite saw the beauty of the idea, as of the other ideas presented to him. He also, however, saw the merits of the opposite idea held by some of his friends, that clothes are things not worth time, money, or trouble, and fashion an irrelevant absurdity. He always assented sincerely to Arnold when he delivered himself on this subject, and with equal sincerity to the tacit recognition of high standards that he met at the Crawfords’ and elsewhere.
He also met at the Crawfords’ their nephew Nevill Bellairs, who was now parliamentary secretary to an eminent member, and more than ever admirable in his certainty about what was right and what wrong. The Crawfords too were certain about that. To hear Nevill on Why Women should Not Vote was to feel that he and Daphne must be for ever sundered, and, in fact, were best apart. Eddy came to that melancholy conclusion, though he divined that their mutual and unhappy love still flourished.
“You’re unfashionable, Nevill,” his aunt admonished him. “You should try and not be that more than you can help.”
Captain Crawford, a simple, engaging, and extraordinarily youthful sailor man of forty-six, said, “Don’t be brow-beaten, Nevill; I’m with you,” for that was the sort of man he was; and the young man from the Foreign Office said how a little while ago he had approved of a limited women’s suffrage, but since the militants, etc., etc., and everyone he knew was saying the same.