When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his hand for a book lying on the table by his side.
Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father and mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sight seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world of some value.
“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later than you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.
“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said Mrs. Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know that I like your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You took a cab, I hope?”
Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights turned on.
“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”
“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.
“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.
“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”
“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with himself—”
“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean, Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine know—”
Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”
“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified, bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his diary.”
“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and then she remembered that her father was there, listening with attention.
“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.
He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her own thoughts.
“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to me about poetry.”
“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”
“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account of her visit to the Suffrage office.
“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”
“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr. Hilbery.
“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.”
“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.
“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the sovereigns into her purse.
“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.
“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for anything.”
“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days, to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public meetings.
Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed, feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always