“I hope you are enjoying yourselves?” Hewet asked the ladies.
“This is a very familiar position for me!” smiled Mrs. Thornbury. “I have brought out five daughters—and they all loved dancing! You love it too, Miss Vinrace?” she asked, looking at Rachel with maternal eyes. “I know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg my mother to let me stay—and now I sympathise with the poor mothers—but I sympathise with the daughters too!”
She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly, at Rachel.
“They seem to find a great deal to say to each other,” said Mrs. Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned away. “Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could make her utter.”
“Her father is a very interesting man,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “He has one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He made a very able reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the last election. It is so interesting to find that a man of his experience is a strong Protectionist.”
She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested her more than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk about the Empire in a less abstract form.
“I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,” she said. “A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—you see. It attacks the rats, and through them other creatures.”
“And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.
“That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated people—who should know better—as callous in the extreme. Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active modern women, who always takes things up, you know—the kind of woman one admires, though one does not feel, at least I do not feel—but then she has a constitution of iron.”
Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy, here sighed.