‘When I was a girl,’ said Sally, ‘and before I met Walter, you know, I fixed a definite price at which I was willing to overlook boringness. As far as I can remember it was twenty-five thousand pounds a year. However, nothing more than twelve seemed to offer, so I married Walter instead.’
‘You have always had such a sensible outlook,’ said Amabelle approvingly. ‘If I had a girl I should say to her, “Marry for love if you can, it won’t last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven’s sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.”’
Michael Lewes walked back through the moonlight to Compton Bobbin in a most curious frame of mind. During his three years’ absence abroad he had persuaded himself that Amabelle really and in her heart of hearts wanted to marry him; at the same time he was convinced that if (too terrible a thought to contemplate) by any unhappy chance he should prove to be wrong and if she should definitely refuse him, in such a manner as to make him feel certain that there was no hope of her ever changing her mind, under those circumstances he would be so very unhappy that he would undoubtedly feel tempted to commit suicide. He had sincerely thought that for him the prospect of life without her would be more than he would be able to bear. And yet now, strangely enough, he felt almost as though a load had been lifted from his shoulders, happier and more light-hearted than for months.
The truth was that during those three years he had made an imaginary picture of Amabelle in his own mind which had become, the longer he was away from home, the more unlike the real woman; until, on finding himself sitting with her, holding that first interview on which he had built so many hopes, he found himself sitting beside a stranger, and the image of Amabelle in his mind was shattered for ever. The things which he said to her then had little real meaning or conviction behind them. They were speeches which he had been rehearsing to himself for three years, and out of a sort of habit, a sort of loyalty to that self which had invented them, he repeated them to her. It was with no particular feeling, except perhaps that of relief, that he received in reply a final and definite refusal. And now, it seemed that the course of his life was delightfully plain before him. Having left diplomacy, a profession of which he was heartily tired, he would settle down at Lewes Park, take his seat in the House of Lords, and marry some pretty, well-born and delightful girl, someone, in fact, not unlike his cousin, Philadelphia Bobbin. He hummed a little tune as he walked.
11
Lady Bobbin was always most particular that the feast of Christmas should be kept by herself, her family and dependents at Compton Bobbin in what she was pleased to call ‘good old-fashioned style’. In her mind, always rather a muddled organ, this entailed a fusion of the Christmas customs brought to his adopted country by the late Prince Consort with those which have been invented by the modern Roman Catholic school of Sussex Humorists in a desperate attempt to revive what they suppose to have been the merrieness of England as it was before she came to be ruled by sour Protestants. And this was odd, because Germans and Roman Catholics were ordinarily regarded by Lady Bobbin with wild abhorrence. Nothing, however, could deter her from being an ardent and convinced Merrie Englander. The maypole on the village green, or more usually, on account of pouring rain, in the village hall; nocturnal expeditions to the local Druid stones to see the sun rise over the Altar Stone, a feat which it was seldom obliging enough to perform; masques in the summer, madrigals in the winter and Morris dances all the year round were organized and led by Lady Bobbin with an energy which might well have been devoted to some better cause. This can be accounted for by the fact of her having a sort of idea that in Merrie England there had been much hunting, no motor cars and that her bugbear, Socialism, was as yet unknown. All of which lent that imaginary period every attribute, in her eyes, of perfection.
But although each season of the year had its own merrie little rite it was at Christmas time that Lady Bobbin and her disciples in the neighbourhood really came into their own, the activities which she promoted during the rest of the year merely paving the way for an orgy of merrieness at Yule. Her first step in this direction was annually to summon at least thirty of the vast clan of Bobbin relations to spend the feast beneath their ancestral roof, and of these nearly twenty would, as a rule, find it convenient to obey. The remainder, even if their absence in Araby or Fair Kashmir rendered it palpably unlikely that they should accept, were always sent their invitation just the same. This was called Decent Family Feeling. Having gathered together all those of her late husband’s relations who were available to come (her own had mostly died young from the rigours of tea planting in the Torrid Zone) she would then proceed to arrange for them to have a jolly Christmas. In this she was greatly helped by her brother-in-law, Lord Leamington Spa, who was also a fervent Merrie Englander, although, poor man, having been banished by poverty from his country estates and obliged to live all the year round in Eaton Square, he had but little scope for his activities in this direction. Those who should have been Lady Bobbin’s prop and mainstay at such a time, her own children, regarded the
