§ 11

He was so busy hating and loving her that he did not notice the large car that passed him at the cross roads till he heard it slithering to a stop. Then he looked up and saw it was his mother’s. Jenny stuck her head out of the window.

“Hullo, Peter! Like a lift home?”

“No thanks, I’m not going home. I’ve got to call at Fourhouses.”

“Haven’t you finished that dreadful business yet?” asked Lady Alard in a tragic voice. The selling of thirty acres to the farm which had originally owned them struck her as the deepest humiliation the family had had yet to swallow.

“Yes—the agreement’s been signed, but there’s a few minor matters cropped up over the transfer.”

“Why don’t you make him come and see you? Why should you walk six miles across country to interview a man like Godfrey?”

“Because I wanted a walk,” said Peter shortly.

“You’ve got terribly restless lately. This is the second time I’ve met you tramping about like a—like a——”

“I call it very sensible of him,” said Jenny—“we’re a lazy lot—rolling about in cars. I’ve half a mind to get down and walk with him.”

“But he’s going to Fourhouses, dear.”

“Never mind—I’d like to see Fourhouses.”

“Your shoes are too thin for walking.”

“Not on a day like this.”

Peter opened the door—he was anxious for Jenny’s company, she would take his thoughts off recent complications. He helped her out, and signed to Appleby to drive on.

“We’ve been paying calls in Winchelsea,” said Jenny with a grimace—“Oh, Peter, this is a dog’s life.”

Peter would not have liked himself to spend an afternoon paying calls, but he regarded it as part of a woman’s duty, and rather disapproved of Jenny’s rebellion. He liked her, and admired her for her young well-bred loveliness, but lately he had begun to think she was getting too like Gervase....

“Somebody must pay calls,” he said a little gruffly.

“Why?” asked Jenny.

“Don’t be silly, my dear. You know it’s a social necessity.”

“Well, it oughtn’t to be—just knowing a lot of dull people because they live in the same neighbourhood and are of the same social standing as ourselves—keeping up our intercourse by means of perfunctory visits which we hate paying as much as they hate receiving ... carefully dodging the tea-hour, so that there’ll be no chance of any real hospitality...”

“So that’s how you choose to describe it——”

“That’s how it is.”

Peter said nothing. He told himself emphatically that Stella probably had exactly the same ideas. Now Vera, for all her intellect and modernity, never shirked her social obligations. Oh, he had done right, after all.

Jenny was enjoying the walk, in spite of her thin shoes and the gruffness of her companion—in spite of some feelings of trepidation at her own recklessness. She was going to see Godfrey again after an interval of nearly two months ... she was going to see him through her own deliberate choice and contrivance. Directly Peter had mentioned Fourhouses she had made up her mind to go with him. If Godfrey’s attraction had not been merely good health and good looks, but his character, his circumstances, she would know more of her own feelings when she saw him in his proper setting, against the background of Fourhouses. His background at present was her own revolt against the conditions of her life—for two months she had seen him standing like a symbolic figure of emancipation among the conventions, restrictions and sacrifices which her position demanded. Life had been very hard for her during those months, or perhaps not so hard as heavy. She had missed the habit of her relation to Jim Parish and felt the humiliation of its breaking off—the humiliation of meeting him casually as he dangled after an heiress.... “He’ll do like Peter—he’ll make himself fall in love with a girl with money and live happy ever afterwards.” She had felt the galling pettiness of the social round, the hollowness of the disguises which her family had adopted, the falseness of the standards which they had set up. “We must at all costs have as many acres of land as we can keep together—we must have our car and our menservants—our position as a ‘county family.’ We call ourselves the New Poor, though we have all these. But we’re not lying, because in order to keep them we’ve given up all the really good things of life—comfort and tranquillity and freedom and love. So we’re Poor indeed.”

She was frankly curious to see the home of the man whose values were not upside down, who had not sacrificed essentials to appearances, who found his pleasure in common things, who, poorer than the poverty of Alard, yet called himself rich. Godfrey had captured her imagination, first no doubt through his virile attraction, but maintaining his hold through the contrast of her brief glimpse of him with the life that was daily disappointing her. She asked Peter one or two questions about Fourhouses. It ran to about four hundred acres, mostly pasture. Godfrey grew wheat, as well as conservatively maintaining his hop-gardens, but the strength of the farm was in livestock. His father had died twelve years ago, leaving the place in surprisingly good condition for those days of rampant free trade—he had a mother and two sisters living with him, Peter believed. Yes, he had always liked Godfrey, a sober, steady, practical fellow, who had done well for himself and his farm.