“No, not Apollo. A youngish sort of Jove, but without his skittishness, or his thunders.”
“I know what you mean. There is something simple and Greek about Eric. It’s nice of you to see it.”
“It’s a great pity he’s my uncle,” remarked Judy. “Do you know, your daughter Millicent has been extremely troublesome lately? I wish you’d speak to her about it. It isn’t only the marriage topic. She wants me to pattern myself after the tiresome daughters of her most tiresome friends. You know the sort of girls I mean. They come out in droves each year, and play tennis in droves, and get married in droves, and have offspring in droves, and get buried beside their forefathers in droves. It’s so dull. I hate doing things in droves.”
This amused Madame Claire.
“Individualists have rather a bad time of it in your mother’s particular set,” she said. “Of course even I want you to marry, because I think you’d be happier in the long run; but not until you find some one you can’t do without.”
“I have a sort of presentiment,” Judy told her, flushing, “that if I ever do marry it will be some one undesirable. That is,” she hastened to explain, “undesirable from mother’s point of view.”
“But not necessarily from mine?” inquired Madame Claire.
“Not necessarily,” returned Judy.
She walked from the hotel to the house in Eaton Square where the Pendletons had lived ever since Noel was born, feeling that the world was a very blank sort of place at the moment. Having done vigorous war work for nearly five years, she was missing it more than she knew. Millicent could and did respond to the call of patriotism, and had seen her sons go forth to war like a Spartan mother; but why her only daughter should continue to do work long after the coming of peace, and when she had a comfortable home, social duties and flowers to arrange, was more than she could understand. So Judy, weary of argument, stayed at home, paid calls and arranged flowers. She felt something of an impostor, too, telling herself that she had cost her parents a great deal, and they were not getting their money’s worth. She had been educated and given an attractive polish for one purpose—to attract and wed a suitable man of a like education and polish. Being honest to the backbone she was distressed about it. She had not fulfilled her side of the contract, and her parents had, to the best of their belief, more than fulfilled theirs.
She avoided the drawing-room where there was tea and chatter, and hurried to her room, which Noel called “The Nunnery,” because of its austere simplicity. The white walls, quaint bits of furniture, and stiff little bed suggested the sixteenth century. The rest of the house was Millicent’s affair, and was “done” every few years in the prevailing mode by a well-known firm of decorators.