Hilda had wanted to go to Birmingham or Manchester; but Edwin said that such an idea was absurd. The best local optician was good enough for the great majority of the inhabitants of the Five Towns and would be good enough for George. Why not indeed? Why the craze for specialists?

There could be nothing uniquely wrong with the boy's eyes,--it was a temporary weakness. And so on and so on, in accordance with Edwin's instinct for denying the existence of a crisis. And the local optician, consulted, had borne him out. The local optician said that every year he dealt with dozens of cases similar to George's. And now both the local optician and Edwin were overthrown by a boy's sobbing tears.

Suddenly Hilda turned round upon her husband.

"I shall take George to London to-morrow about his eyes," she said, with immense purpose and sincerity, in a kind of fierce challenge.

This was her amends to George for having often disbelieved him, and for having suspected him of taking after his father. She made her amends pa.s.sionately, and with all the force of her temperament. In her eyes George was now a martyr.

"To London?" exclaimed Edwin weakly.

"Yes. It's no use half doing these things. I shall ask Charlie Orgreave to recommend me a first-cla.s.s oculist."

Edwin dared say nothing. Either Manchester or Birmingham would have been just as good as London, perhaps better. Moreover, she had not even consulted him. She had decided by a violent impulse and announced her decision. This was not right; she would have protested against a similar act by Edwin. But he could not argue with her. She was far beyond argument.

"I wouldn't have that boy's eyesight played with for anything!" she said fiercely.

"Well, of course you wouldn't! Who would?" Edwin thought, but he did not say it.

"Go and see what he's doing," she said.

Edwin slouched off. He was no longer the master of the house. He was only an economic factor and general tool in the house. And as he wandered like a culprit up the stairs of the mysteriously transformed dwelling he thought again: "What is it that binds me to her?" But he was abashed and in spite of himself impressed by the intensity of Hilda's formidable emotion. Nevertheless as he began vaguely to perceive all that was involved in her threat to go to London on the morrow, he stiffened, and said to himself: "We shall see about that. We shall just see about that!"

V

They were at the meal. Hilda had covered George's portion of fish with a plate and put it before the fire to keep warm. She was just returning to the table. Tertius Ingpen, who sat with his back to the fire, looked at her over his shoulder with an admiring smile and said:

"Well, I've had some good meals in this house, but this is certainly the best bit of fish I ever tasted. So that the catastrophe in the kitchen leaves me unmoved."

Hilda, with face suddenly transformed by a responsive smile, insinuated herself between the table and her arm-chair, drew forward the chair by its arms, and sat down. Her keen pleasure in the compliment was obvious. Edwin noted that the meal was really very well served, the table brighter than usual, the toast crisper, and the fish--a fine piece of hake white as snow within its browned exterior--merely perfect. There was no doubt that Hilda could be extremely efficient when she desired; Edwin's criticism was that she was too often negligent, and that in her moods of conscientiousness she gave herself too urgently and completely, producing an unnecessary disturbance in the atmosphere of the home.

Nevertheless Edwin too felt pleasure in the compliment to Hilda; and he calmly enjoyed the spectacle of his wife and his friend side by side on such mutually appreciative terms. The intimacy of the illuminated table in the midst of the darker room, the warmth and crackling of the fire, the grave solidity of the furniture, the springiness of the thick carpet, and the delicate odours of the repast,--all these things satisfied in him something that was profound. And the two mature, vivacious, intelligent faces under the shaded gas excited his loyal affection.

"That's right," Hilda murmured, in her clear enunciation. "I do like praise!"

"Now then, you callous brute," said Ingpen to Edwin. "What do you say?"

And Hilda cried with swift, complaining sincerity:

"Oh! Edwin never praises me!"

Her sincerity convinced by its very artlessness. The complaint had come unsought from her heart. And it was so spontaneous and forcible that Tertius Ingpen, as a tactful guest, saw the advisability of easing the situation by laughter.

"Yes, I do!" Edwin protested, and though he was shocked, he laughed, in obedience to Ingpen's cue. It was true; he did praise her; but not frequently, and almost always in order to flatter her rather than to express his own emotion. Edwin did not care for praising people; he would enthusiastically praise a book, but not a human being. His way was to take efficiency for granted. "Not so bad," was a superlative of laudation with him. He was now shocked as much by the girl's outrageous candour as by the indisputable revelation that she went hungry for praise. Even to a close friend such as Ingpen, surely a wife had not the right to be quite so desperately sincere. Edwin considered that in the presence of a third person husband and wife should always at any cost maintain the convention of perfect conjugal amenity. He knew couples who achieved the feat,--Albert and Clara, for example. But Hilda, he surmised, had other ideas, if indeed she had ever consciously reflected upon this branch of social demeanour. Certainly she seemed at moments to lose all regard for appearances.

Moreover, she was polluting by acerbity the pure friendliness of the atmosphere, and endangering cheer.

"He's too wrapped up in the works to think about praising his wife,"

Hilda continued, still in the disconcerting vein of sincerity, but with less violence and a more philosophical air. The fact was that, although she had not regained the zest of the mood so rudely dissipated by the scene with Ada, she was kept cheerful by the mere successful exercise of her own energy in proving to these two men that servants were not in the least essential to the continuance of plenary comfort in her house; and she somewhat condescended towards Edwin.

"By the way, Teddie," said Ingpen, pulling lightly at his short beard, "I heard a rumour that you were going to stand for the Town Council in the South ward. Why didn't you?"

Edwin looked a little confused.

"Who told you that tale?"

"It was about."

"It never came from me," said Edwin.

Hilda broke in eagerly:

"He was invited to stand. But he wouldn't. I thought he ought to. I begged him to. But no, he wouldn't. And did you know he refused a J.P.ship too?"

"Oh!" mumbled Edwin. "That sort o' thing's not my line."

"Oh, isn't it!" Ingpen exclaimed. "Then whose line is it?"

"Look at all the rotters in the Council!" said Edwin.

"All the more reason why you should be on it!"

"Well, I've got no time," Edwin finished gloomily and uneasily.

Ingpen paused, tapping his teeth with his finger, before proceeding, in a judicial, thoughtful manner which in recent years he had been developing:

"I'll tell you what's the matter with you, old man. You don't know it, but you're in a groove. You go about like a shuttle from the house to the works and the works to the house. And you never think beyond the works and the house."

"Oh, don't I?"

Ingpen went placidly on:

"No, you don't. You've become a good specimen of the genus 'domesticated business man.' You've forgotten what life is. You fancy you're at full stretch all the time, but you're in a coma. I suppose you'll never see forty again--and have you ever been outside this island? You went to Llandudno this year because you went last year.

And you'll go next year because you went this year. If you happen now and then to worry about the failure of your confounded Liberal Party you think you're a blooming broad-minded publicist. Where are your musical evenings? When I asked you to go with me to a concert at Manchester last week but one, you thought I'd gone dotty, simply because it meant your leaving the works early and not getting to bed until the unheard-of-time of one thirty a.m."

"I was never told anything about any concert," Hilda interjected sharply.

"Go on! Go on!" said Edwin raising his eyebrows.

"I will," said Ingpen with tranquillity, as though discussing impartially and impersonally the conduct of some individual at the Antipodes. "Where am I? Well, you're always buying books, and I believe you reckon yourself a bit of a reader. What d'you get out of them? I daresay you've got decided views on the transcendent question whether Emily Bronte was a greater writer than Charlotte. That's about what you've got. Why, dash it, you haven't a vice left. A vice would interfere with your lovely litho. There's only one thing that would upset you more than a machinery breakdown at the works----"

"And what's that?"

"What's that? If one of the hinges of your garden-gate came off, or you lost your latchkey! Why, just look how you've evidently been struck all of a heap by this servant affair! I expect it occurred to you your breakfast might be five minutes late in the morning."

"Stuff!" said Edwin, amiably. He regarded Ingpen's observations as fantastically unjust and beside the mark. But his sense of fairness and his admiration of the man's intellectual honesty would not allow him to resent them. Ingpen would discuss and dissect either his friends or himself with equal detachment; the detachment was complete. And his a.s.sumption that his friends fully shared his own dispa.s.sionate, curious interest in arriving at the truth appealed very strongly to Edwin's loyalty. That Ingpen was liable to preach and even to hector was a drawback which he silently accepted.