“Seven.”
“Send her away next year. There is that very excellent school at Cheltenham managed by Miss Sandys. She was a wrangler, you know, and is an LL.D. Her ideas are absolutely sound. Psychological discipline is one of her great points.”
“I must speak to James about it. He is such a difficult man to deal with. So immovable, and always turning things into a kind of quiet laughter.”
“I know. Most difficult—most baffling.”
Though three people sat down at the dinner table, it was a diner à deux so far as the conversation was concerned. The women discussed the Primrose League Fête, and Lord Parallax, whom Gertrude Canterton had found rather disappointing. From mere local topics they travelled into the wilderness of eugenics, Mrs. Brocklebank treating of Mendelism, and talking as though Canterton had never heard of Mendel. It amused him to listen to her, especially since the work of such master men as Mendel and De Vries formed part of the intimate inspiration of his own study of the strange beauty of growth. Mrs. Brocklebank appeared to have muddled up Mendelism with Galton’s theory of averages. She talked sententiously of pure dominants and recessives, got her figures badly mixed, and uttered some really astonishing things that would have thrilled a scientific audience.
Yet it was dreary stuff when devitalised by Mrs. Brocklebank’s pompous inexactitudes, especially when accompanied by an interminable cracking of nuts. She always ended lunch and dinner with nuts, munching them slowly and solemnly, exaggerating her own resemblance to a white cow chewing the cud.
Canterton escaped upstairs, passed Miss Vance on the landing, a motherly young woman with rich brown hair, and made his way to the nursery. The room was full of the twilight, and through the open window came the last notes of a thrush. Lynette was lying in a white bed with a green coverlet. Her mother had ordered a pink bedspread, but Miss Vance had thought of Lynette’s hair.
Canterton sat on the edge of the bed.
“Well, Princess, are you a pure dominant?”
“I’ve said my prayers, daddy.”