"Oh, no, Mother. I should hate to do that. Do let me stay and look after Father, you know that there's nothing really wants doing. You go instead."
"It's quite impossible." Mrs. Hammond picked up her husband's supper-tray. "I like to think that you can enjoy yourself. Go along, dear, and have a good time. I shall manage."
Muriel knew that her mother had wanted to go. She knew that, as far as Mr. Hammond was concerned, the maids could have administered to his wants. But she had slowly come to realize that the passion which had once led Mrs. Hammond to commit her single social indiscretion could still draw her aside from that concentration on her position which had once or twice moved Muriel to vague uneasiness.
She had not wanted to go, and her spring hat had not come yet from Kingsport, and the morning of the picnic had been strained and harassed at home because of Father, and Mother's disappointment, and the rest of it. By the time that she arrived at the yard from whence the picnic was to start in hired waggonettes she was wishing that she never need have come.
There stood Mrs. Marshall Gurney with a bunch of primroses on her sables, and Mrs. Waring, looking elegantly worried as she stooped with her lorgnette over a bunch of papers, and Mrs. Hobson, fussing backwards and forwards between the gate and the already laden waggonettes. Everybody looked terribly smart and confident and self absorbed. The space between Muriel and the waggonettes was painfully wide. She wanted to shrink away on to her seat and be forgotten.
"Any room in the last waggonette?" called Mrs. Marshall Gurney.
"Quite full up," returned Mrs. Hobson, with the metallic crispness of one who may have a Yorkshire accent but knows that she is as good as many of those who haven't.
"Any room in your carriage, Phyllis?"
But Phyllis Marshall Gurney regretted that she had promised to keep the only seat available in her carriage for somebody else, and blushed deeply as she said it. Muriel was almost ready to retire defeated, when Delia Vaughan called to her from the first carriage. Grateful but embarrassed, Muriel went forward, and climbed in among the knees and new tweed skirts of the élite of Marshington. She counted them surreptitiously, Adelaide Waring and a cousin, Dennis Smallwood, Nancy Cartwright, Bobby Mason and Delia. A man for every girl except herself. Wise by experience, she sighed, thinking of the long day before her. At Heathcroft, if you had no partner, you could at least walk with the last couple in the crocodile. At Marshington it seemed that you could only sit and look forlorn among the sandwiches.
The waggonettes waited.