And now Mrs. Spenser-Smith’s anxiety for the general welfare of the family had brought Miss Mole into the house.
He glanced with a frown, to which he quickly added a sigh, at the handsomely framed photograph on his desk, another of Mrs. Spenser-Smith’s gifts. He did not like that representation of his wife. He preferred the little one on his bedroom mantelpiece in which her soft face looked at him hopefully above the stiff collar and tie, and under the hard straw hat of her youth. It told him that he was indeed the man he believed himself to be, while this photograph, of a much later date, had suffered some distortion of expression in the enlarging process on which Mrs. Spenser-Smith had insisted. It vexed him that people who had not known her should imagine that faintly humorous, patient look was hers. Miss Mole, for instance, must have received a false impression, if she was capable of receiving any impression at all, and about this Mr. Corder’s opinion wavered. She seemed stupid, outside her sphere. She had been stupidly frivolous—or was it merely tactless?—tonight, but he was disturbed by her remark, ridiculous in itself, that it would be out of Samuel Blenkinsop’s character to rob a bank. They were unlikely words from the Miss Mole he knew and they had been uttered with a crispness and an assurance which, to quote her own expression, were out of character.
He turned to the letters on his desk. He was wasting time over a matter to which he would not have given a thought if Wilfrid’s idleness and Blenkinsop’s desertion had not upset him. He was, of course, well abreast of his times in his views about women, and it would have horrified him to learn that he could not judge a clever or a plain woman fairly. A clever one challenged him to a combat in which he might not be the victor and a plain one roused in him a primitive antagonism. In failing to please him, a woman virtually denied her sex and became offensive to those instincts which he did his best to ignore.
His letters were soon answered. He might have prepared a sermon, but he was in no mood for it. His interview with the Dean rankled in his memory, his interview with Wilfrid had not given him the satisfaction he expected. Wilfrid, even when submissive, suggested an amused superiority, impossible to notice and therefore impossible to deal with. Samuel had been heavily courteous, but uncommunicative, in reply to the rallying reproaches with which Mr. Corder had met him. In these days a young man showed no pleasure at being treated as an equal, he seemed to expect it, and, after all, Mr. Corder reflected, Blenkinsop must be well on in the thirties. A different method might have been better, he decided, and he had no desire to be another man’s conscience. He had done his duty in the way of reminder, but he was not a tradesman seeking custom, and that brought his thoughts back to Wilfrid, his sister’s son. She had made a marriage to which her father was opposed and it had turned out badly, but the surprisingly snug profits of the parental drapery business had been left to her. The elder Corder had been just as strongly opposed to Robert’s entering the ministry: to the small tradesman, it seemed a costly business, with years of paying out money for which he would get no return, and Robert, as stubborn as his sister, had financed himself with immense difficulty and labour and some timely help from good Nonconformists who were attracted by the handsome, eager young man. Robert Corder considered his rebellion, unlike his sister’s, justified by its intention and its results which his father had not had the generosity to acknowledge, while he had rewarded her, who had merely followed her inclination, and left her in a position to pay her brother for his care of her son. Irritated that he could not afford to get rid of Wilfrid and lose the money, he took a turn up and down the room, glancing at the clock. Ruth must have forgotten to say good night to him. Hurt by his favourite daughter, angry with Wilfrid, Blenkinsop and Miss Mole, he could not settle down to read or to write, and Hannah, entering punctually with the tea-tray, found him standing in front of the fire with his hands in his pockets.
“Always punctual!” he said with deceptive cordiality.
“I try to be,” Hannah said modestly, putting down the tray. “But what a miserable little fire!” She knelt down to replenish it. “Men,” she said, as though to herself, while she was busy with poker and tongs, “are chillier creatures than women, but I’ve never met one yet
