He stopped speaking as Robert Corder came into the room, with a letter in his hand. “This is for you, Miss Mole,” he said, giving it to her slowly, and he looked at her curiously and then at Wilfrid impatiently. “I thought you were playing with the others.”
“So I am, sir. I’m waiting till they call me in. It’s one of those games where there’s more waiting than playing.”
Without examining it, Hannah had dropped the letter on to her knee, with the address turned upwards. “And they begin talking about something else,” she said.
“Oh yes,” Wilfrid returned her smile, “they’re doing that.”
“Well,” said Robert Corder, “I hope you are not disturbing Miss Mole.”
“No, we’re talking about something else, too,” she said pleasantly. “And I can sew at the same time. A woman can always do two things at once. If she couldn’t, she’d have a dreary time of it.”
“I often envy women,” Robert Corder said. “They have useful and not exacting occupation for their hands, and no labour need be dreary.”
To this, neither Wilfrid nor Miss Mole ventured a reply, and Robert Corder retired after another look at the letter on Hannah’s knee.
“He wants to know who your letter’s from, he wants to know what we’re talking about, he wants to talk to somebody himself. You ought to have encouraged him. Mona Lisa.”
“Ought I?”
“Yes.” He nodded his head sagely. “Just for the good of the community.”
“Why didn’t you do it, then?”
“He hates the sight of me,” Wilfrid said. “Too much like my father. But you want to read your letter.”
“I’m not sure that I do. I don’t know who it’s from.”
When she had read it, she realized that Robert Corder must have recognised the clerkly hand of Mr. Blenkinsop who asked her to tea with him early the next week. “I haven’t a hat fit to wear,” was Hannah’s first thought, and the second was one of impatience that Mr. Blenkinsop could not manage his affairs without support, but there was something flattering in his desire to see her, and something touching, and, as she thought of him, who looked so self-sufficient, she was bound to wonder if Robert Corder, also, was not as much a baby as the rest of them. Mr. Blenkinsop was a solemn infant who asked for what he wanted and Robert Corder was a spoilt one who expected his needs to be divined.
XXII
Robert Corder’s work took him out of the house for a great part of the day, but it also brought him back at times when a business man is in his office and knows nothing of domestic affairs until he returns to find a meal awaiting him and the work of the day apparently done. Robert Corder was conscious perforce of the doings of the household. He would swing down the garden path in the morning and meet the butcher’s boy carrying a recognisable joint, and if the joint did not appear in a cooked condition that evening, he would wonder where it was and why Miss Mole had ordered it a day before it was needed, or he would come back and see half the drawing-room furniture in the hall and get a glimpse of Miss Mole doing something with a duster or a feather broom. His study was never disturbed in this manner. The fire was lighted before breakfast, and the room, presumably, dusted and swept, and when he was in the house he chose to sit there, but, even in that sanctuary, he could not be unaware of sounds and movements. He could hear the front door and the back door bells when they were rung and the thumping feet of Doris as she ran up the three stairs from the kitchen, and if she did not introduce a visitor into the study, he would, as likely as not, hear her voice, with its Radstowe burr, calling Miss Mole to settle some question with which she could not deal herself. He could distinguish Ethel’s prancing step from Miss Mole’s quick, even one, and sometimes, when he heard the front door shut, he would stroll to his window to see whether it was his housekeeper or his daughter who had gone out. When it was his daughter, he would have a slight feeling of discomfort: when it was Miss Mole he felt an active irritation. There was something wrong with Ethel’s appearance and he could not give it a name, but he knew she did not look definitely feminine, like Miss Patsy Withers, in spite of her bright colours, or completely unconscious of herself, as her mother had been, and she certainly was not pretty. That, perhaps, was a good thing. It would have been a great and highly distasteful anxiety to have had a daughter who attracted young men, and Ethel had given her heart to her work and seemed to be content. People spoke very well of her in the chapel and told him he should be as proud of such a daughter as she should be of such a father. This praise of her seemed to him somewhat exaggerated, but there was no doubt she was a good girl and her fits of passion seemed to be less frequent, but it was difficult to be patient with her nervousness and secretly he resented, while he benefited from, her protective plainness.
When he watched Miss Mole it was with definitely antagonistic feelings. The alert bearing of her head, her quick step, seemed to him unsuitable in a housekeeper, and arrogant in a woman who had no pretensions to good looks. If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been meek, and he supposed it was possible to be domestically intelligent without looking as though she had some secret
