“I’m sure she, too...” Lady Maitland turned, as the door opened. “Well, my dear, how did you get on?”
Ivy looked past her to Eric and then turned to her mother with shining eyes:
“It was wonderful! Mr. Lane, you’re the perfect host, you know.”
Eric bowed, noting from her form of address that she did not yet propose to take her parents into her confidence. Lady Maitland was looking closely at her, and he wondered what inference was being drawn from the tell-tale, starry brightness of the eyes. Magic and poetry were not dead so long as a man could charm that soft diamond sheen from a girl’s eyes... He discovered that the judge was asking him a question—and wondered what inference would be drawn from his own tell-tale absence of mind....
“It was such a glorious day, it couldn’t help being successful,” he said hastily. “We caught the eleven o’clock at Paddington and went to Maidenhead....”
He was still describing their day, when Ivy’s two sisters entered with their husbands. Eric did not hear much of Lady Maitland’s mumbled introduction, but one woman appeared to be Rose and the other Myrtle. Their mother evidently inclined towards horticultural prettiness; and the judge had probably been very scornful when the names were chosen. Scorn, indeed, seemed his fixed attitude of mind towards his family; the sons-in-law forgot that they were promising young chancery barristers and were only careful to avoid being committed for contempt of court. One had travelled from Wimbledon, the other from Beaconsfield; they came every week like fascinated rabbits... If it had not been the middle of the Cambridge term, Ivy’s two brothers would have completed the ceremonial, unchanging circle... The elder sisters had Ivy’s good looks without her rebelliousness of spirit; in any massed attack against their parents they would first hesitate and then surrender; marriage was to them primarily an escape from the necessity of making massed attacks on any one; they were their mother’s daughters....
Supper was announced; and Eric found himself between the elder sister, who never spoke, and Lady Maitland, who only stopped speaking when the judge drowned her voice. As wine followed wine and course followed course, Eric felt that rules could be framed for the legal profession, binding its private life as straitly as the inhibitions of caste-law. At one remove he had watched it in the days when he shared chambers in Pump Court with Jack Waring and observed the grub of the pupil-room, who lunched with fellow-grubs in Hall, developing through the chrysalis stage of the newly-called junior into the practising barrister who first marshalled a judge and was later bidden by younger marshals to dine with the judge in his lodgings. From his friend’s description Eric gathered that most barristers and all judges lived in the same kind of house, married the same kind of wife and ate the same food. At the end of dinner they told the same legal anecdotes before suggesting bridge. (Mr. Justice Maitland probably disapproved of bridge on Sundays, but he had been playing golf at Walton Heath—with other judges....)
Eric sipped a matchless sherry and sympathized with Lady Maitland over her difficulties in obtaining butter during the war. (A small farmer who lived near her old home in Hampshire had been willing to supply an unlimited quantity, but the judge felt that it was bad citizenship to exceed their ration by an ounce.) Ivy was watching them silently, asking him with her eyes whether he now wondered why she had run away from home; no vice could be imputed to her parents, but they were solidly uncongenial, and in his turn Eric privately debated the possibility of being able to break away altogether from the Cromwell Road after marriage. To rescue her from the judge was no less important than to rescue her from Gaymer. It would be intolerable, if he were expected to dine there regularly; fortunately, he was at present being treated with extravagant deference, which shewed that a reputation still had its value; and, for a man, economic freedom consisted in being able to patronize his father-in-law....
Strong mock-turtle soup and sherry; cold salmon and champagne that was drinkable—and no more—(the judge had brought it out in Eric’s honour, and it had been kept long enough to lose its quality); cold roast beef, gooseberry tart and cheese, followed by a bottle of ’84 Dow; it was a plain, substantial meal, spoiled by Lady Maitland’s unceasing efforts to make her guest overeat himself and by his own need to talk in three keys at once. The judge asked what the next play was to be and gave himself a cue for recalling and describing the London stage as he had known it in his youth (from the age of thirty he had been too busy to spare time for the theatre, and nowadays—with certain illustrious exceptions which he did not need to specify—there were no plays worth seeing). Lady Maitland was still troubled by the butter shortage and the difficulties of providing for a big house; it was a pain of spirit, which wrung from her a moan whenever she could make it heard; and, though the judge dominated the conversation with his cues and speeches, she remained resolutely undefeated with an inexhaustible store of food-news which she poked through the interstices of her husband’s periods.
“I was asked to be chairman of a committee on dramatic censorship,” he explained. “That’s how I come to be interested in the subject.”