The girl looked helplessly at her brother for a minute or two. Peter cocked up a whimsical, appealing eye from under his bandages. The defiance melted out of her face.
“I’ll tell the truth,” said Lady Mary.
“Good egg,” said Peter, extending a hand. “I’m sorry. I know you like the fellow, and we appreciate your decision enormously. Truly, we do. Now, sail ahead, old thing, and you take it down, Parker.”
“Well, it really all started years ago with George. You were at the Front then, Peter, but I suppose they told you about it—and put everything in the worst possible light.”
“I wouldn’t say that, dear,” put in the Duchess. “I think I told Peter that your brother and I were not altogether pleased with what we had seen of the young man—which was not very much, if you remember. He invited himself down one weekend when the house was very full, and he seemed to make a point of consulting nobody’s convenience but his own. And you know, dear, you even said yourself you thought he was unnecessarily rude to poor old Lord Mountweazle.”
“He said what he thought,” said Mary. “Of course, Lord Mountweazle, poor dear, doesn’t understand that the present generation is accustomed to discuss things with its elders, not just kowtow to them. When George gave his opinion, he thought he was just contradicting.”
“To be sure,” said the Dowager, “when you flatly deny everything a person says it does sound like contradiction to the uninitiated. But all I remember saying to Peter was that Mr. Goyles’s manners seemed to me to lack polish, and that he showed a lack of independence in his opinions.”
“A lack of independence?” said Mary, wide-eyed.
“Well, dear, I thought so. What oft was thought and frequently much better expressed, as Pope says—or was it somebody else? But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you—though that’s nothing new. Like Browning and those quaint metaphysical people, when you never know whether they really mean their mistress or the Established Church, so bridegroomy and biblical—to say nothing of dear St. Augustine—the Hippo man, I mean, not the one who missionized over here, though I daresay he was delightful too, and in those days I suppose they didn’t have annual sales of work and tea in the parish room, so it doesn’t seem quite like what we mean nowadays by missionaries—he knew all about it—you remember about that mandrake—or is that the thing you had to get a big black dog for? Manichee, that’s the word. What was his name? Was it Faustus? Or am I mixing him up with the old man in the opera?”
“Well, anyway,” said Mary, without stopping to disentangle the Duchess’s sequence of ideas, “George was the only person I really cared about—he still is. Only it did seem so hopeless. Perhaps you didn’t say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots—dreadful things!”
“Yes,” said the Duchess, “he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude.”
Peter grinned, but Mary went on unheeding.
“George had simply no money. He’d really given everything he had to the Labor Party one way and another, and he’d lost his job in the Ministry of Information: they found he had too much sympathy with the Socialists abroad. It was awfully unfair. Anyhow, one couldn’t be a burden on him; and Gerald was a beast, and said he’d absolutely stop my allowance if I didn’t send George away. So I did, but of course it didn’t make a bit of difference to the way we both felt. I will say for mother she was a bit more decent. She said she’d help us if George got a job; but, as I pointed out, if George got a job we shouldn’t need helping!”
“But, my dear, I could hardly insult Mr. Goyles by suggesting that he should live on his mother-in-law,” said the Dowager.
“Why not?” said Mary. “George doesn’t believe in those old-fashioned ideas about property. Besides, if you’d given it to me, it would be my money. We believe in men and women being equal. Why should the one always be the breadwinner more than the other?”
“I can’t imagine, dear,” said the Dowager. “Still, I could hardly expect poor Mr. Goyles to live on unearned increment when he didn’t believe in inherited property.”
“That’s a fallacy,” said Mary, rather vaguely. “Anyhow,” she added hastily, “that’s what happened. Then, after the war, George went to Germany to study Socialism and Labor questions there, and nothing seemed any good. So when Denis Cathcart turned up, I said I’d marry him.”
“Why?” asked Peter. “He never sounded to me a bit the kind of bloke for you. I mean, as far as I could make out, he was Tory and diplomatic and—well, quite crusted old tawny, so to speak. I shouldn’t have thought you had an idea in common.”
“No; but then he didn’t care twopence whether I had any ideas or not. I made him promise he wouldn’t bother me with diplomats and people, and he said no, I could do as I liked, provided I didn’t compromise him. And we were to live in Paris and go our own ways and not bother. And anything was better than staying here, and marrying somebody in one’s own set, and opening bazaars and watching polo and meeting the Prince of Wales. So I said I’d marry Denis, because I didn’t care about him, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t care a halfpenny about me, and we should have left each other alone. I did so want to be left alone!”
“Was Jerry all right about your money?” inquired Peter.
“Oh, yes. He said Denis was no great catch—I do wish Gerald wasn’t so vulgar, in that flat, early-Victorian way—but he said that, after George, he could only thank his stars it wasn’t worse.”
“Make a note of that, Charles,” said Wimsey.
“Well, it seemed all right at first, but, as things went
