“Refused to defend the case—spared myself and everybody all this muck.”
“It’s very difficult, standing up to the family. But you’ve done it now. I wish I could.... Goodbye, Mary dear, and I expect we’ll meet in town before very long.”
“Goodbye.”
The Ford gargled, and they ran round the flower-bed in the middle of Conster’s gravel sweep. Jenny waved farewell from the doorstep and went indoors. Gervase began to whistle; he seemed happy—“I wonder,” thought Mary, “if it’s true that he’s in love.”
§ 14
During the upheaval which followed Mary’s departure, George Alard kept away from Conster. He wouldn’t go any more, he said, where he wasn’t wanted. What was the good of asking his advice if he was to be insulted—publicly insulted when he gave it? He brooded tenaciously over the scene between him and his father. Sir John had insulted him not only as a man but as a priest, and he had a right to be offended.
Rose supported him at first—she was glad to find that there were occasions on which he would stand up to his father. George had been abominably treated, she told Doris—really one was nearly driven to say that Sir John had no sense of decency.
“He speaks to him exactly as if he were a child.”
“He speaks to us all like that.”
“Then it’s high time somebody stood up to him, and I’m very glad George did so.”