“I don’t know, dear.”
“But why should she mind?”
Why, indeed? Eve found herself visualising Gertrude Canterton’s sallow face and thin, jerky figure, and she felt chilled and discouraged. What manner of woman was this Gertrude Canterton, this champion of charities, this eager egoist, this smiler of empty smiles? Had she the eyes and ears, the jealous instincts of a woman? Did she so much as realise that the place she called her home hid the dust and dry bones of something that should have been sacred? Was she, in truth, so blindly self-sufficient, so smothered in the little vanities of little public affairs that she had forgotten she was a wife? If so, what an impossible woman, and what a menace to herself and others.
“Mother doesn’t care for flowers, Miss Eve.”
“Oh, how do you know?”
“I’ve never seen her pick any. And she can’t arrange a vase. I’ve seen her try.”
“But she may be fond of them, all the same.”
“Then why doesn’t she come out here with daddy?”
“Perhaps she has too much to do.”
“But I never see her doing anything, like other people. I mean mending things, and all that. She’s always going out, or writing letters, or having headaches.”