The furs and the bonnet and the previous day's treatment she had had, all helped to brace her up on Marjorie's doorstep for a complex and difficult situation, and to carry her through the first tensions of her call. She was so much to pieces as it was that she could not help feeling how much more to pieces she might have been—but for the grace of Silas Root. She knew she ought to have very strong feelings about Trafford, though it was not really clear to her what feelings she ought to have. On the whole she was inclined to believe she was experiencing moral disapproval mixed up with a pathetic and rather hopeless appeal for the welfare of the tender life that had entrusted itself so recklessly to these brutal and discreditable hands, though indeed if she had really dared to look inside her mind her chief discovery would have been a keenly jealous appreciation of Trafford's good looks and generous temper, and a feeling of injustice as between her own lot and Marjorie's. However, going on her assumed basis she managed to be very pale, concise and tight-lipped at any mention of her son-in-law, and to put a fervour of helpless devotion into her embraces of her daughter. She surveyed the house with a pained constrained expression, as though she tried in vain to conceal from herself that it was all slightly improper, and even such objects as the Bokhara hangings failed to extort more than an insincere, "Oh, very nice, dear—very nice."
In the bedroom, she spoke about Mr. Pope. "He was dreadfully upset," she said. "His first thought was to come after you both with a pistol. If—if he hadn't married you——"
"But dear Mummy, of course we meant to marry! We married right away."
"Yes, dear, of course. But if he hadn't——"
She paused, and Marjorie, with a momentary flush of indignation in her cheeks, did not urge her to conclude her explanation.
"He's wounded," said Mrs. Pope. "Some day perhaps he'll come round—you were always his favourite daughter."
"I know," said Marjorie concisely, with a faint flavour of cynicism in her voice.
"I'm afraid dear, at present—he will do nothing for you."
"I don't think Rag would like him to," said Marjorie with an unreal serenity; "ever."
"For a time I'm afraid he'll refuse to see you. He just wants to forget——. Everything."
"Poor old Dad! I wish he wouldn't put himself out like this. Still, I won't bother him, Mummy, if you mean that."
Then suddenly into Mrs. Pope's unsystematic, unstable mind, started perhaps by the ring in her daughter's voice, there came a wave of affectionate feeling. That she had somehow to be hostile and unsympathetic to Marjorie, that she had to pretend that Trafford was wicked and disgusting, and not be happy in the jolly hope and happiness of this bright little house, cut her with a keen swift pain. She didn't know clearly why she was taking this coldly hostile attitude, or why she went on doing so, but the sense of that necessity hurt her none the less. She put out her hands upon her daughter's shoulders and whimpered: "Oh my dear! I do wish things weren't so difficult—so very difficult."
The whimper changed by some inner force of its own to honest sobs and tears.
Marjorie passed through a flash of amazement to a sudden understanding of her mother's case. "Poor dear Mummy," she said. "Oh! poor dear Mummy. It's a shame of us!"
She put her arms about her mother and held her for awhile.
"It is a shame," said her mother in a muffled voice, trying to keep hold of this elusive thing that had somehow both wounded her and won her daughter back. But her poor grasp slipped again. "I knew you'd come to see it," she said, dabbing with her handkerchief at her eyes. "I knew you would." And then with the habitual loyalty of years resuming its sway: "He's always been so good to you."...
But Mrs. Pope had something more definite to say to Marjorie, and came to it at last with a tactful offhandedness. Marjorie communicated it to Trafford about an hour later on his return from the laboratory. "I say," she said, "old Daffy's engaged to Magnet!"
She paused, and added with just the faintest trace of resentment in her voice: "She can have him, as far as I'm concerned."
"He didn't wait long," said Trafford tactlessly.
"No," said Marjorie; "he didn't wait long.... Of course she got him on the rebound."...
§ 6
Mrs. Pope was only a day or so ahead of a cloud of callers. The Carmel girls followed close upon her, tall figures of black fur, with costly-looking muffs and a rich glitter at neck and wrist. Marjorie displayed her house, talking fluently about other things, and watching for effects. The Carmel girls ran their swift dark eyes over her appointments, glanced quickly from side to side of her rooms, saw only too certainly that the house was narrow and small——. But did they see that it was clever? They saw at any rate that she meant it to be clever, and with true Oriental politeness said as much urgently and extravagantly. Then there were the Rambord girls and their mother, an unobservant lot who chattered about the ice at Prince's; then Constance Graham came with a thoroughbred but very dirty aunt, and then Ottiline Winchelsea with an American minor poet, who wanted a view of mountains from the windows at the back, and said the bathroom ought to be done in pink. Then Lady Solomonson came; an extremely expensive-looking fair lady with an affectation of cynicism, a keen intelligence, acutely apt conversation, and a queer effect of thinking of something else all the time she was talking. She missed nothing....
Hardly anybody failed to appreciate the charm and decision of Marjorie's use of those Bokhara embroideries.
They would have been cheap at double the price.
§ 7
And then our two young people went out to their first dinner-parties together. They began with Trafford's rich friend Solomonson, who had played so large and so passive a part in their first meeting. He had behaved with a sort of magnanimous triumph over the marriage. He made it almost his personal affair, as though he had brought it about. "I knew there was a girl in it," he insisted, "and you told me there wasn't. O-a-ah! And you kept me in that smell of disinfectant and things—what a chap that doctor was for spilling stuff!—for six blessed days!..."