“But I shouldn’t dream of asking her to come against your wishes. We discussed this in America, before I engaged my present secretary.”
Lady Maitland was still visibly fluttered by finding Eric at her table and discovering him to be Ivy’s intimate friend. The wives of barristers and judges lived to as rigid a pattern as that of their husbands; and it was part of their guild-law to dislike the idea of any girl’s wandering off in the morning and returning at night without giving any account of herself or having any one to look after her. Mr. Lane, indeed, had a big enough position of his own to make him careful of his reputation; he seemed steady and sensible, agreeing with almost everything that she had said....
The judge felt that he had been trapped. It was no longer possible to launch side-long reproaches at Ivy, when the responsibility of the decision was put into his hands. As he waited for their decision, Eric was able to break free for a moment from their fog of timid conventionality and ask himself what they would think if they ever guessed why he was there at that moment.
“Well, that’s a very proper sentiment,” said the judge at length, “very proper. I’m glad to find one person in the house who thinks that the wishes of parents should be consulted; I’m glad that Ivy should see that this is not merely senile perversity or malice... I’m sure we can trust her to you, Lane. If you could discover what we’ve done to make life insupportable to her at home,” he added caustically, “we shall be glad of enlightenment.”
Eric laughed, because it saved an answer; but Rose and Myrtle were sitting upright and tense in scared anticipation of a scene, while their husbands ransacked void brains for an attractive subject of conversation. Lady Maitland was gamely casting back to the gross tonnage of bully-beef wantonly wasted by the expeditionary force in the first six months of the war; but their prompt and practised contrivance only strengthened his feeling that he had never seen a house in which the older generation succeeded less in understanding and sympathizing with the aspirations, the enthusiasms, even the follies of the young. He was sorry for Ivy and her brothers and sisters, sorry for the common, faded, pretty mother; but he was also sorry for the blue-jawed judge, who was a more interesting dramatic type, ruling like a patriarch until dumb obedience changed without warning, so far as he could see, to flaming revolt. A bigger man would not feel humiliated that his daughter had transferred herself to a house two miles away in the same city, because life at home rawed her nerves; the judge only knew that this thing had been done, and he suspected that the whole legal world of South Kensington was discussing it with malicious interest.
At the end of dinner, the two sisters whispered to their husbands about trains and slipped away with a murmured good-night. Left with an untried audience, the judge returned freshly to the charge. While he was at the bar, Maitland had won grudging tributes to the range and depth of his knowledge; in his facts, if not in his law, he improvized the little that he did not know, and the habit had become permanent in his conversation. Before they had finished discussing the rival degrees of hard work demanded of literature and the bar, Eric had detached himself from the plans of personal interest and fatigue and was surveying his host as a study to be committed to a certain closely guarded note-book in his safe at home. The judge conversed methodically: he would introduce his subject with a flourish like a self-conscious proprietor flinging open the door of a room and asking his visitors what they thought of that; after listening to half the answer, he would raise one hand, beg leave to interrupt and develop his theme unsparingly, only stopping when the chance of asking another question promised him the opportunity of delivering another discourse.
“I’m afraid I shall have to be going in a moment,” said Eric, as the judge offered him a second cigar. “I have work to do before I go to bed.”
“Well, I’m very glad to have had this talk. You’ll come upstairs?” He led the way to the door and paused with his fingers on the handle. “Do you know a friend of Ivy’s called Gaymer?”
“I’ve met him a certain number of times,” Eric answered easily enough.
“What d’you think of him?”