'You said just now you had had your lunch,' Dick argued.
'I know I did,' Veronica admitted. 'One minute you are told that it is wicked to tell lies; the next?'
'Veronica!' Robina interrupted threateningly.
'It's easy for you,' retorted Veronica. 'You are not a growing child. You don't feel it.'
'The least you can do,' said Robina, 'is to keep silence.'
'What's the good,' said Veronica?not without reason. 'You'll tell them when I've gone to bed, and can't put in a word for myself. Everything is always my fault. I wish sometimes that I was dead.'
'That I were dead,' I corrected her. 'The verb 'to wish,' implying uncertainty, should always be followed by the conditional mood.'
'You ought,' said Robina, 'to be thankful to Providence that you're not dead.'
'People are sorry when you're dead,' said Veronica.
'I suppose there's some bread-and-cheese in the house,' suggested Dick.
'The baker, for some reason or another, has not called this morning,' Robina answered sweetly. 'Neither unfortunately has the grocer. Everything there is to eat in the house you see upon the table.'
'Accidents will happen,' I said. 'The philosopher?as our friend St. Leonard would tell us?only smiles.'
'I could smile,' said Dick, 'if it were his lunch.'
'Cultivate,' I said, 'a sense of humour. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good.'
'Did you have anything to eat at the St. Leonards'?' he asked.
'Just a glass or so of beer and a sandwich or two,' I admitted. 'They brought it out to us while we were talking in the yard. To tell the truth, I was feeling rather peckish.'
Dick made no answer, but continued to chew bacon-rind. Nothing I could say seemed to cheer him. I thought I would try religion.
'A dinner of herbs?the sentiment applies equally to lunch?and contentment therewith is better,' I said, 'than a stalled ox.'
'Don't talk about oxen,' he interrupted fretfully. 'I feel I could just eat one?a plump one.'
There is a man I know. I confess he irritates me. His argument is that you should always rise from a meal feeling hungry. As I once explained to him, you cannot rise from a meal feeling hungry without sitting down to a meal feeling hungry; which means, of course, that you are always hungry. He agreed with me. He said that was the idea?always ready.
'Most people,' he said, 'rise from a meal feeling no more interest in their food. That was a mental attitude injurious to digestion. Keep it always interested; that was the proper way to treat it.'
'By 'it' you mean . . . ?' I said.
'Of course,' he answered; 'I'm talking about it.'
'Now I myself;' he explained?'I rise from breakfast feeling eager for my lunch. I get up from my lunch looking forward to my dinner. I go to bed just ready for my breakfast.'
Cheerful expectancy, he said, was a wonderful aid to digestion. 'I call myself;' he said, 'a cheerful feeder.'
'You don't seem to me,' I said, 'to be anything else. You talk like a tadpole. Haven't you any other interest in life? What about home, and patriotism, and Shakespeare?all those sort of things? Why not give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to think of something else.'
'How can you think of anything,' he argued, 'when your stomach's out of order?'
'How can you think of anything,' I argued, 'when it takes you all your time to keep it in order? You are not a man; you are a nurse to your own stomach.' We were growing excited, both of us, forgetting our natural refinement. 'You don't get even your one afternoon a week. You are healthy enough, I admit it. So are the convicts at Portland. They never suffer from indigestion. I knew a doctor once who prescribed for a patient two years' penal servitude as the only thing likely to do him permanent good. Your stomach won't let you smoke. It won't let you drink?not when you are thirsty. It allows you a glass of Apenta water at times when you don't want it, assuming there could ever be a time when you did want it. You are deprived of your natural victuals, and made to live upon prepared food, as though you were some sort of a prize chicken. You are sent to bed at eleven, and dressed in hygienic clothing that makes no pretence to fit you. Talk of being hen-pecked! Why, the mildest husband living would run away or drown himself, rather than remain tied for the rest of his existence to your stomach.'
'It is easy to sneer,' he said.
'I am not sneering,' I said; 'I am sympathising with you.'
He said he did not want any sympathy. He said if only I would give up over-eating and drinking myself, it would surprise me how bright and intelligent I should become.
I thought this man might be of use to us on the present occasion. Accordingly I spoke of him and of his theory. Dick seemed impressed.
'Nice sort of man?' he asked.
'An earnest man,' I replied. 'He practises what he preaches, and whether because, or in spite of it, the fact remains that a chirpier soul I am sure does not exist.'
'Married?' demanded Dick.
'A single man,' I answered. 'In all things an idealist. He has told me he will never marry until he can find his ideal woman.'
'What about Robina here!' suggested Dick. 'Seem to have been made for one another.'
Robina smiled. It was a wan, pathetic smile.
'Even he,' thought Robina, 'would want his beans cooked to time, and to feel that a reasonable supply of nuts was always in the house. We incompetent women never ought to marry.'
We had finished the bacon. Dick said he would take a stroll into the town. Robina suggested he might take Veronica with him, that perhaps a bun and a glass of milk would do the child no harm.
Veronica for a wonder seemed to know where all her things were. Before Dick had filled his pipe she was ready dressed and waiting for him. Robina said she would give them a list of things they might bring back with them. She also asked Dick to get together a plumber, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a glazier, and a civil engineer, and to see to it that they started off at once. She thought that among them they might be able to do all that was temporarily necessary, but the great thing was that the work should be commenced without delay.
'Why, what on earth's the matter, old girl?' asked Dick. 'Have you had an accident?'
Then it was that Robina exploded. I had been wondering when it would happen. To Dick's astonishment it happened then.
Yes, she answered, there had been an accident. Did he suppose that seven scrimpy scraps of bacon was her notion of a lunch between four hungry persons? Did he, judging from himself, imagine that our family yielded only lunatics? Was it kind?was it courteous to his parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave?to assume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And at forty-eight?or a trifle over?one is not going down into the grave, not straight down. Robina when excited uses exaggerated language. I did not, however, interrupt her; she meant well. Added to which, interrupting Robina, when?to use her own expression?she is tired of being a worm, is like trying to stop a cyclone with an umbrella.) Had his attention been less concentrated on the guzzling of cold bacon (he had only had four mouthfuls, poor fellow)?had he noticed the sweet patient child starving before his very eyes (this referred to Veronica)?his poor elder sister, worn out with work and worry, pining for nourishment herself, it might have occurred to even his intelligence that there had been an accident. The selfishness, the egotism of men it was that staggered, overwhelmed Robina, when she came to think of it.
Robina paused. Not for want of material, I judged, so much as want of breath. Veronica performed a useful service by seizing the moment to express a hope that it was not early-closing day. Robina felt a conviction that it was: it would be just like Dick to stand there dawdling in a corner till it was too late to do anything.
'I have been trying to get out of this corner for the last five minutes,' explained Dick, with that angelic smile of his that I confess is irritating. 'If you have done talking, and will give me an opening, I will go.'
Robina told him that she had done talking. She gave him her reasons for having done talking. If talking to him would be of any use she would often have felt it her duty to talk to him, not only with regard to his stupidity and selfishness and general aggravatingness, but with reference to his character as a whole. Her excuse for not talking to him was the crushing conviction of the hopelessness of ever effecting any improvement in him. Were it otherwise
