"What I cannot understand," said Mrs. Holmes, "is why John ever allowed the man to come near the village at all."
"Oh, but as far as I can see, he didn't let them come in. That was all Mary's doing." Ursula pulled a cushion down more comfortably between her shoulders and smiled at the circle of interested faces.
"Mary? Why Mary?" asked Anne, whose round little mouth perpetually opened in search of information, as though she were a bird awaiting a gift of worms.
Sarah Bannister also looked up from her knitting. "Yes, Ursula, why Mary?"
"Oh, that socialist creature you know—your friend, Sarah. He began it all. Mary brought him to Anderby and rubbed his chest with Elliman's Embrocation because he had a cold, and he started agitating among the labourers—and then the band played. Of course we all know that Mary's awfully well-meaning, and all that, but, really, one would have thought she'd have had a little more sense."
Since her return from the Hardrascliffe nursing-home, Ursula had become an increasingly intimate member of the circle of Robson women. Their "quaintness" amused her, when the activities of a smarter set of sporting friends proved too strenuous, and her position as the mother of the only male Robson of the rising generation was agreeably important.
"You need not call him my friend, Ursula," snapped Sarah, who alone was not overcome by the charm of her cousin-in-law's society. "The young man would have had impertinence enough to argue with Mr. Asquith himself, but he hadn't brains to upset a single creature in the village, I know—not alone, anyway."
Mrs. Holmes shook a doleful head. "Well, I don't know what we're all coming to, I'm sure. What do you think Emily said to me this morning?"
"Is Emily the cook or the parlourmaid?" asked Anne.
"Emily is the parlourmaid of course—that girl who Mrs. Thomson recommended to me and thought was so nice, only she would breathe on the silver before she polished it, which I always think is such an infectious habit, don't you, with all this influenza and germs about? Though, since the doctor at Harrogate told me I ought to spend my winters abroad, I'm sure I hardly dare to think of a germ without swallowing a formamint, nasty though they are. But Emily came to me just when I was having a little dry toast with my tea in bed—all the doctor will allow me during this new treatment—and said to me 'Please, m'm, may I go to a dance to-night in the village?' And I said, 'Emily,' I said, 'you can never complain of the way I have treated you, always having the same as we have in the dining-room, and there's no more beautiful food within twenty miles of Market Burton I'm sure. And if it was a question of a night out to go and see your young man's people, it would be a different matter. But a dance!' I said, 'This is too much. I will not have any maids learning the same steps as my nieces dance in the Town Hall at Leeds.'"