Chapter 10

Miss Entwhistle, however, made up her mind very firmly that after this one afternoon of giving herself up to her feelings she was going to behave in the only way that is wise when faced by an inevitable marriage, the way of sympathy and friendliness.

Too often had she seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriages of their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become an attitude unable to be altered, long after years had made it ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.

Thus Miss Entwhistle reasoned that first sleepless night in bed, and on these lines she proceeded during the next few months. They were trying months. She used up all she had of gallantry in sticking to her determination. Lucy’s instinct had been sound, that wish to keep her engagement secret from her aunt for as long as possible. Miss Entwhistle, always thin, grew still more thin in her constant daily and hourly struggle to be pleased, to enter into Lucy’s happiness, to make things easy for her, to protect her from the notice and inquiry of their friends, to look hopefully and with as much of Lucy’s eyes as she could at Everard and at the future.

‘She isn’t simple enough,’ Wemyss would say to Lucy if ever she said anything about her aunt’s increasing appearance of strain and overwork. ‘She should take things more naturally. Look at us.’ For it was the one fly in Lucy’s otherwise perfect ointment, this intermittent consciousness that her aunt wasn’t altogether happy.

And then he would ask her, laying his head on hers as he stood with his arms about her, who had taught his little girl to be simple; and they would laugh, and kiss, and talk of other things.

Miss Entwhistle was unable to be simple in Wemyss’s sense. She tried to; for when she saw his fresh, unlined face, his forehead without a wrinkle on it, and compared it in the glass with her own which was only three years older, she thought there must be a good deal to be said for single-mindedness. It was Lucy who told her Everard was so single-minded. He took one thing at a time, she said, concentrating quietly. When he had completely finished it off then, and not till then, he went on to the next. He knew his own mind. Didn’t Aunt Dot think it was a great thing to know one’s own mind? Instead of wobbling about, wasting one’s thoughts and energies on side-shows?

This was the very language of Wemyss; and Miss Entwhistle, after having been listening to him in the afternoon—for every time he came she put in a brief appearance just for the look of the thing, and on the Saturday and Sunday outings she was invariably present the whole time—felt it a little hard that when at last she had reached the end of the day and the harbour of her empty drawing-room she should, through the mouth of Lucy, have to listen to him all the evening as well.