"These violent delights have violent ends. He says it is only a passing fancy; and I suppose he'll be taking up something else directly—golf perhaps—and going mad about that."
"No doubt. Men all seem alike, don't they?" And Enid smiled and nodded her head. "Though I must say, Charles is very true to his hunting. I mean to wean him from steeple-chasing; but I like him to hunt. It keeps him in such splendid health."
"Yes, dear. It must be tremendous exercise. Do you ride to the meets with him?"
"No, I never seem to have time—and for the moment, though we've six horses in the stable, there's not one that I quite see myself on." And Enid laughed again, gaily. "Good enough for Charles, you know—but he can ride anything. He wants to get me a pony-cart, and I shall be safer in that."
The constraint was wearing off. While they talked, each availed herself of any chance of investigating the other's face—a shy swift glance, instantaneously deflected to the teacups or the mantelpiece, if a head turned to meet it. At first there had been difficulty in speaking of the husbands, but now it was quite easy; and it all sounded fairly natural.
"Oh, but that is just the sort of thing Charlie says." The daughter helped the mother. "Men always think they can manage things better than we can—and they're always troublesome about the servants. The only occasions on which Charles makes one really angry are when he upsets the servants."
And Mrs. Marsden helped Enid.
"You must employ all your tact—men are so easily led, though they won't be driven."
"No, they must be led," said Enid, with a return to complete artificiality of manner. "How true that is!"
But there was a very subtle alteration in Enid. Beneath the artificial manner gradually there became perceptible something altogether new and strange. This was another Enid—not the old Enid. She had evidently caught the peculiar tone of bucolic gentility and covert-side fashion common to most of her new associates, and this had slightly altered her; but deeper than the surface change lay the changes slowly manifesting themselves to the instinctive penetration of her mother. Enid was softer, more gentle, a thousand times more capable of sympathy.