Mr. Tovey hated to be disturbed in the evening of this day of rest. Especially on such an evening as the present. The day had been an eminently satisfactory one, from his point of view. The sirloin of beef, carefully selected by Mrs. Tovey from the stock of her friend the Meat Purveyor, over the way, had been of uncommon succulence; the Yorkshire pudding crisped to that exact degree of golden delicacy that Mr. Tovey’s heart desired. True, he had had a slight difference of opinion with Mrs. Tovey, but that had merely given a zest to a day which might otherwise have been uneventful. Mr. and Mrs. Tovey never really quarrelled. For one thing they were neither of them of a quarrelsome disposition, and for another they were both too fond of their own comfort to risk its disturbance by domestic rancour. But sometimes they did not see eye to eye, as in the present case.
It had begun when Mr. Tovey had come down to the kitchen, and noticed that only two places had been laid at the table. He had raised his eyebrows and glanced towards the massive form of Mrs. Tovey, bending over the glowing range.
“Hullo! Where’s Ivy, then?” he asked, in an almost querulous tone.
“Gone out with Ted,” replied Mrs. Tovey quietly, from among the saucepans. “He’s taken her home to dinner, and they’re going on to the pictures afterwards.”
Mr. Tovey clicked his tongue, his favourite expression of annoyance. Of course, Ted and Ivy had known one another since they were children. Old Sam Copperdock, Ted’s father, was Mr. Tovey’s oldest friend, and they had been near neighbours ever since the latter, as a newly married man, had bought the greengrocery business. Still, Mr. Tovey didn’t altogether like it. Ivy was twenty now, and young Ted Copperdock only three years older. Just the sort of age when young folks get the bit between their teeth and go and get married without a thought of the future. Old Sam was a thorough good chap, and his son was a very nice lad; Mr. Tovey would not have denied either of these facts for a moment. But Ted’s only prospects lay in his father’s shop in Praed Street, and Mr. Tovey had very different views of his only child’s future, very different.
Yet he had never put these views into words. Perhaps he would have found it very difficult to do so, for Mr. Tovey’s vocabulary was strictly limited. But they were there, just the same—had been ever since Ivy’s prowess at school had discovered her to be a “scholar.” From that moment Mr. Tovey had been at great pains to educate his daughter to an entirely different state of life from that which it had pleased God to call her. That she was by now tall, distinctly pretty, and extraordinarily self-possessed was not, one supposes, due to the efforts of Mr. Tovey. But she certainly owed the fact that she was an extremely competent shorthand typist to the pains he had devoted to her education.
Mr. Tovey, though naturally he would have been justifiably annoyed at such a suggestion, had an incurably romantic core to his plodding and material mind. Of course, in common with most of his class, he firmly believed that human happiness varied exactly with the social scale. “As happy as a king” was to him no mere catchword. He was convinced—and, to do him justice, he drew considerable satisfaction from the conviction—that the members of the Royal Family were the happiest persons in the land, and that this happiness descended in regular gradation through the ranks of the nobility and gentlefolk until it reached acute misery somewhere in the lower strata of those who dwelt in slums. From this outlook on life it necessarily followed that the more he could enable Ivy to better herself, the happier she must ultimately be.
How this betterment was to take place, Mr. Tovey never explained. But sometimes he had a vague intangible dream of Ivy, his Ivy, captivating the heart of some susceptible employer, preferably of the upper classes. His eye, diverted for the moment from the business of wrapping up a parcel of leeks, often caught sight of the pictures in the newspaper which he was using for the purpose. “Lady Mary Mayfair (right) and the Countess of Piccadilly (left) on the lawn at Ascot.” Suppose that one day he should proudly open the paper to find Ivy with a smile like that, gracefully posing under the heading “A leader of Society in the paddock at Goodwood”? After all, why not?
But it was not until after the second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire that he made any further remark about his daughter to Mrs. Tovey. “I wouldn’t encourage young Ted to hang around Ivy too much, if I was you,” he said, as he pushed aside his plate.
“Encourage? He don’t want no encouraging,” replied Mrs. Tovey briskly. “He just comes in, cheerful like, nods to me, asks after you, says a word or two to Ivy, and away they goes together. Things ain’t the same now as they was when we was their age, Jim.”
“No, it’s a fact they ain’t,” agreed Mr. Tovey darkly.
“But let ’em alone,” continued Mrs. Tovey. “Ivy’s not the girl to make a fool of herself, you ought to know that by this time. Now you can go and sit in your chair by the fire. It’s not the sort of day for the likes of us to be going out.”
Mr. Tovey shook his head, as though unconvinced by his wife’s words, and looked out of the window. Much as he might disagree with her on the subject of their daughter, there was no doubt that she was right about the weather. It was the beginning of November, and the month
