Part 4 (2/2)
”Penelope,” said her mother abruptly, ”I have dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better ring the bell for tea.”
Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of existence.
”I cannot think what I did with them,” complained Penelope's mother, as though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. ”If you had not upset me so dreadfully, Penelope----”
Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's l.u.s.ty announcement of my name having pa.s.sed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand she banished eternal truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived n.o.body; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.
”How charming of you to look in just as Penelope and I were going to have tea! Come and sit near me,” was the gracious greeting I received.
She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope, who was showing no inherited instinct for bridging impa.s.sable gulfs. ”My dear, can you find my ear-trumpet? I am sure I had it a moment ago.”
”You had,” murmured the rebellious Penelope. ”It might just as well have stayed in the coal-box the whole time, for all the good it was to either of us!”
It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless discourse on ribbon embroidery, Penelope had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of needle-work, that Penelope's mother stopped being my Early Victorian hostess and became the mother of all the ages.
”I suppose,” she said, with the true motherly mixture of appeal and disapproval in her tone, ”it is you who have converted Penelope to all this nonsense.”
”No,” I said. ”The age has converted her. Penelope is the child of the age.”
”She has no business to be anybody's child but her mother's,” was the indignant reply. ”When I was a girl daughters were their mother's own children----”
I interrupted to ask if she really thought that this had ever been true.
The ear-trumpet described furious circles in the air--another danger signal, as I knew from experience.
”When I was a girl,” said Penelope's mother once more, ”we had the good manners not to let our mothers guess that we knew more than they did--even if we did.”
I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs, why she had not taken my advice and left me to risk my friends.h.i.+p with her mother, instead of imperilling her own?
”It was idiotic of me,” confessed Penelope; ”she said something unfair about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?”
”Listen!” I interrupted.
Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came sc.r.a.ps of conversation.
”It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah.”
”Yes'm.”
”Florence Nightingale, the n.o.blest Englishwoman who ever lived--I hope you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom, Sarah?--Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way.”
”Yes'm.”
”I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead.”
”Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am.”
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