Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being unaware of self?... In Belfast, when he had left John Marsh, and in his loneliness had thought of the way Sheila had humiliated him, he had had a sharp sense of revulsion from her, a loathing for her, a desire never to see her again; but now, sitting here looking at Mary and oppressed by her youngladyishness, his longing for Sheila came back to him with greater strength, and he resolved that he would write to her that night and beg her to forgive him for his cowardice and let him be her sweetheart again....

"Will you have some more tea!" Mary was saying to him, and he started at the sound of her voice.

"Oh, thanks!" he said, pa.s.sing his cup to her.

"Thinking, Quinny?" Gilbert exclaimed, reaching for a bun.

"Eh? Oh, yes! I was thinking!" he answered. "What time does the evening post go out?" he said to Ninian.

"Six-twenty-five," Ninian answered.

"Thanks. I just want to write to Ireland!..."

"It'll get there just as soon if you post it to-morrow," said Gilbert.

Mary left them. "I'm going up to mother," she said, as she got up from the tea table. "She's awfully sorry she couldn't be down to welcome you," she added to Henry who had moved to open the door for her.

"I hope she'll soon be better," he answered.

When she had gone, Ninian got up and cursed l.u.s.tily.

"d.a.m.n and blast him," he said.

They did not speak. They knew that Ninian's anger had some relation to Mrs. Graham's headache and the letter from Uncle Peter, and they felt that it was not their business to speak, even though Ninian had drawn them into the affair.

"I'm sorry," said Ninian, sitting down again. "I ought not to have broken out like that before you chaps, but I couldn't help it."

Henry coughed as if he were clearing his throat, but he did not speak, and Gilbert sat still and gazed at the toe of his shoe.

"He always upsets mother, d.a.m.n him!" Ninian looked up at them. "My Uncle Peter married a girl in a confectioner's shop at Cambridge. He's that kind of a.s.s! He never writes to mother except when he's in a mess, and he always expects her to get him out of it. I can't stand a man who does that sort of thing. She's an awful b.i.t.c.h, too ... his wife! We had them here once!... My G.o.d!"

Ninian lay back in his seat and remained silent for a while as if he were contemplating in his mind the picture of Uncle Peter and his wife on that awful visit to Boveyhayne. They waited for him to continue.

"I used to feel ashamed to go into the village," he said at last. "The way she talked to the fishermen--one minute snubbing them, and the next, talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of them. A d.a.m.ned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you like this!"

"That's all right," said Gilbert.

"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor mother had a h.e.l.l of a time while they were here!"

"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.

"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"

It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert, in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-d.a.m.n-sight-better-politician, but he did not say it.

"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter isn't happy, and between them they make us d.a.m.n miserable. That kind of marriage is bound to fail, _I_ think. People ought to marry in their own cla.s.s!..."

"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.

"_She_ isn't!"

It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his cla.s.s. He listened to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of cla.s.ses, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila.

Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.

"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're always equal now. We're not!..."

"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.

"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and manners can be fairly equalised!..."

"Minds can't!"

"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start mingling cla.s.ses until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong way over little things that don't really matter, but that irritate like blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me off that kind of thing!"

It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not make a man feel ashamed!...

He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.

"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ...

that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse.

Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to them. I wish to G.o.d talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a prig!..."

He broke off almost angrily.

"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"

"But it's true all the same," he went on when they got outside, almost as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not, we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry, you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."

They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying there....

"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"

"Not always," Henry replied.

"Nearly always," said Gilbert.

"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.

6

He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend, and he saw that her look was brighter.

"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down the stairs again. "It's unlucky to pa.s.s people on the stairs. Don't you know that?"

He descended again as she bade him, laughing as he did so, and waited until she had come down.

"Mother's much better now," she said when she had reached his side.