It would be all right in the morning! He had said that many a time overnight, in tiff-times, and peace had followed as predicted. Tulse Hill, considered as an incident, was too recent for any sort of conciliatory effort to be worth making—to-night, at any rate. Let it alone, and have a finishing smoke! Go back to the Ostrogoths!
Then, as he wondered whether, for all its slow combustion, the grate would not consume its coal before he got through his cigar, there came back to him an image of Judith Arkroyd in a dangerous form—an image in which physical beauty was subordinate to a subtle relationship of soul, which he had imperceptibly slipped into ascribing to his own and hers. A dangerous form, because Love played a new part in it for this man. His first wife had probably been—put it plainly—a mistake; his second ... well!—he was very fond of Marianne—very—and they had had many happy times together. But it wasn't quite the same thing as—oh, dear!—well, it couldn't be, you know! One can't have everything.
Much more dangerous, that sort of thing, to our thinking, than the primitive fascinations of Aphrodite herself! Indeed, we have sometimes thought that lady didn't go the right way to work in that affair with Adonis. She should have sympathized with him. All the same, mind you!—so Cynicism murmurs at our elbow—man has an extraordinary faculty for detecting companion-souls to his own, pulses preordained to beat in unison with his, in bodies of extraordinary beauty, of indisputable grace. He may squint, and his eyesight be defective, but his predestined She, the mate of his soul, will gaze on him through lustrous orbs of tender radiance. Her voice will reach him through the rosiest of lips, the pearliest of teeth, without so much as one gold stopping; and all the while there will he be, without a sound tooth in his head to boast of, unless he has the effrontery to make a parade of his crown-and-bridge treatment. He may even wear a wig, and brazen it out, in the same breath with a protest against a single false tress on the head of his other dearer life-in-life—this comes out of Poetry, somewhere—while as for a Venus Calva ... simply out of the question, thank you!
Anyhow, the predestined mate of the soul was a much more kittle head of cattle to shoe behind when chosen for her beauty from among the daughters of an aristocracy not celebrated for ugliness, and manipulated by photographers into bestowing their eyes upon the readers of the shiniest print that ever lay on the table of an hotel reading-room.
[CHAPTER XXV]
OF AN UNCALLED FAMILY ROW, AND HOW BOB'S BREAKFAST WAS POSTPONED. OF A LETTER FROM JUDITH THAT MADE MATTERS WORSE
The Mistake's son was the unfortunate means of causing the next day to begin badly. For he rose early, and hastened to the plague-centre at Putney whence Records flowed, to acquire in exchange for the condemned piece of mere music either "The White-Eyed Musical Kaffir" or something equally juicy. Naturally, he found the shop not open, at an hour when sparse milk and eggs were the only things procurable. "Won't open till ten," was the current opinion. Bob, disgusted, called on his friend Tommy Eldridge, and found sympathy and consolation. Tommy had had the "Musical Kaffir" for two days past, and the Kaffir had palled. He would swop him for the "mere music" record and twopence. Bob closed with the offer, but the bargain had taken time; and, as a consequence, he burst in upon breakfast at half-past eight o'clock, and announced his acquisition with an evident conviction that his hearers had been awaiting his return with suspended breaths. His step-mother—or aunt; either will do—confiscated his treasure promptly, and denounced Science within the home-circle. Lectures, she said truly, were one thing; houses another. Bob cited the indulgences shown to other fellows by their parents in respect of phonographs, and Cat said that Tommy Eldridge always had his till tea-time. Her mother told her not to speak with her mouth full, and met Master Bob's half-inaudible "I shall ask the Governor, anyhow!" with so harsh an enquiry, "What's that you're saying, sir? Don't mumble to yourself!" that Bob evacuated his position, and awaited reinforcements.
Marianne was making the common mistake of easing ill-temper by attacking objects blameless of provoking it—blowing off steam through wrong channels. At another time she would have been too lazy to open a campaign against a phonograph. Now she found it a relief to pitch in—Bob's phrase—and enlarged her scheme of operations. "If it wasn't for your father," she said, "you would all be breakfasting upstairs." Bob, who was afraid of her because she had boxed his ears for him before now—and not so very long ago—only muttered a sotto-voce "I'm a Rugby boy now, and that would be grandmother," expressing in his simple, limited way his sense of acquired status, and the folly of ignoring it. Marianne, who was not really the least angry with Bob, and certainly didn't care twopence about the "Musical Kaffir," saw in this suppressed defiance an outlet for her own high-pressure atmosphere, and jumped at its inaudibility as though it were the head and front of its offending. What was it he was mumbling?—she said again, with growing anger. He wouldn't mumble if his father was here. Bob denied this audibly, probably meaning that he had said nothing he would have scrupled to say to his father. He felt indignant and injured; having, indeed, meant no wrong, though his preoccupation about the glorious phonograph had no doubt made his speech appear careless.