"Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you won't stay?"
Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the hall and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot hedge. "Thank you, thank you so much," she was murmuring hurriedly. "I don't see your husband anywhere about—never mind—so good of you—good-bye——"
"Come again soon, won't you?"
"Yes, yes—oh, yes! … No, no, please don't!" (Mrs. Pratt had made a half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). "Straight across the Heath you said, didn't you? I shall find it quite easily! Don't come any further—good-bye——"
And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's extended fingers as timorously as she might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.
II
THE POND-ROOM
The truth was not very far to seek: Lady Tasker was too old for these things. Nobody could have expressed this more effectively than Mrs. Cosimo Pratt herself, had it entered the mind of Mrs. Pratt to conceive that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker was. "Those casts!" Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement—or rather Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the Wedding Service about making over to your husband, along with your love and obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name. "Those poor casts! … Of course they may not be very beautiful—," here the original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes, "—but such as they are—goodness me! How can people be so prurient, Cosimo? Don't they see that what they really prove has nothing at all to do with the casts, but—ahem!—a good deal to do with their own imaginations? I don't want to use the word 'morbid,' but really! … Well, thank goodness Corin and Bonniebell won't grow up like that! Afraid of the beautiful, innocent human form! … Now that's what I've always claimed, Cosimo—that that's the type of mind that's made all the mischief we've got to set right to-day."
But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden (or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)—and in the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall—the very forefront of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt's foreign friends, who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied The Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room, and elsewhere. …
Had she not said it herself, Lady Tasker would never have believed it. …
What a—what a—what an extraordinary thing!——
Lady Tasker had fled from The Witan still under the influence of that access of effusive schoolgirlishness in which she had told Mrs. Pratt that she really must go; nor did she grow up again all at once. But little by little, as she walked, she began to resume the burden of her years. She became eighteen, twenty-five, thirty again. By the time she reached the lower pond Arthur had just got that billet in the India Office, and her brother Dick, of the Department of Woods and Forests, had married Ada Polperro, daughter of old Polperro of Delhi fame, and her sister Emily had got engaged to Tony Woodgate, of the Piffers. (But those casts!) … Then as she took the path between the ponds she remembered the children at Ludlow, the three little girls at Cromwell Gardens, and the arrival on Saturday of the "Seringapatam." (But those natives!) … The thought of the children settled it. Her curious lapse into juvenescence was over. By the time she rang Dorothy's bell she was the same Lady Tasker who changed the political opinions of policemen and deprecated the wanderings of Saint Paul.
Dorothy's flat was as different as it could well be from that other house which (Lady Tasker had already decided) had something odd and furtive about it—stagnant yet busy, segregated yet too wide open. The flat had one really brilliant room. This room did not merely overlook the pond in front of it; it seemed actually to have asked the pond to come inside. A large triple window occupied the whole of one end of it; this window faced west; and not only did the September sun shine brightly in, but the inverted sun in the water shone in also, doubling (yet also halving) all shadows, illumining the ceiling, and setting the cream walls a-ripple with the dancing of the wavelets outside. Sprightly chintzes looked as if they also might begin to dance at any moment; the china in Dorothy's cupboards surprised the eye that had not expected this altered light; and presently, to complete the complexity, the shadow of the sycamore in the little garden below would move round, so that you would hardly be able to tell whether the ceaseless creeping on the cream walls was glitter of ripples, pattern of leaves, or both.
Dorothy sat in her accordion-pleats by the window, surrounded by letters. And pray do not think it mere coincidence in this story that her letters were Indian letters. Some interests that the home-amateur takes up as he might take up poker-work or the diversion of jig-saw hold a large part of the hearts and lives of others, and so Dorothy, as she did more or less every week, had been reading her cousin Churchill's letter, and that of her little niece and namesake Dot, up in Murree, and Eva Woodgate's, who had sent her a parcel from Kohat, and others. She rose slowly as her aunt was announced, and put her finger on the bell as she passed.
"How are you, auntie?" she said, kissing Lady Tasker on both cheeks. "Give me your things. Somehow I thought you might come to-day, but I'd almost given you up. Do look what Eva's sent me! Really, with her own to look after, I don't know how she finds the time! Aren't they sweet!——"
And she held them up.
Now Lady Tasker knew perfectly well the meaning of her niece's accordion-pleating; but she was seventy and worldly-wise again now. Therefore as she looked at the things she remarked off-handedly, "But they're far too small."
"Too small!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Of course they aren't. Why, Noel was only nine, and that's pretty big, and Jackie only just over eight-and-a-half, though he put on weight while you watched him. They're just right."
Lady Tasker reached for a chair. "But they are for Jackie, aren't they?"
Dorothy's blue eyes were as big as the plates in her cupboards.—"Jackie! Good gracious, auntie!——"
"Eh?" said Lady Tasker, sitting down. "Not Jackie? Dear me. How stupid of me. Of course, I did hear, but I've so many other things to think of, and nobody'd suppose, to look at you——"
Dorothy ran to her aunt and gave her a kiss and a hug, a loud kiss and a hug like two.
"You dear old thing!—Really, I'd begun to hate all the horrid kind people who asked me how I felt to-day and whether I shouldn't be glad when it was over! What business is it of theirs? I nearly made Stan sack Ruth last week, she looked so, and I positively refuse to have a young girl anywhere near me! … But wasn't it sweet of Eva? I'll give you some tea and then read you her letter. Indian or China?"
"China," Lady Tasker remarked.
"China, Ruth, and I'll have some more too. I don't know whether His Impudence is coming in or not; he's gadding off somewhere, I expect. … But you weren't only pretending just now, were you, auntie?——"
She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.
"Well, how are the Bits?" Lady Tasker asked. …
(Perhaps "His Impudence" and "The Bits" require explanation. Both expressions Dorothy had from her "maid," Ruth Mossop. "Maid" is thus written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series of disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop