Althea went down to Merriston House in the middle of July. Helen accompanied her to see her safely installed and to set the very torpid social ball rolling. There were not many neighbours, but Helen assembled them all. She herself could stay only a few days. She was bound, until the middle of August, in a rush of engagements, and meanwhile Althea, rather ruefully, was forced to fall back on Miss Buckston for companionship. She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston's cheerful dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment, and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never before the defects of this excellent person's many qualities.
She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston's amusement, and sat a good deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling open all the windows, 'You are frightfully frusty in here.'
It was not 'frusty.' Althea had a scientific regard for ventilation, and a damp breeze from the garden blew in at the furthest window. She had quite enough air.
Miss Buckston was also very critical of Merriston House, and pointed out the shabbiness of the chintz and faded carpets. The garden, she said, was shamefully neglected, and she could not conceive how people could bear to let a decent place like this go to ruin. 'But he's a slack creature, Gerald Digby, I've heard.'
Althea coldly explained that Mr. Digby was too poor to live at Merriston and to keep it up. She did not herself in the least mind the shabbiness.
'Oh, I don't mind it,' said Miss Buckston. 'I only think he's done himself very well in getting you to take the place in this condition. How much do you give for it?'
Althea, more coldly, named the sum. It was moderate; Miss Buckston had to grant that, though but half-satisfied that there was no intention to 'do' her friend. 'When once you get into the hands of hard-up fashionable folk,' she said, 'it's as well to look sharp.'
Althea did not quite know what to say to this. She had never in the past opposed Miss Buckston, and it would be difficult to tell her now that she took too much upon herself. At a hint of hesitancy, she knew, Miss Buckston would pass to and fro over her like a steam-roller, nearly as noisy, and to her own mind as composedly efficient. Hesitancy or contradiction she flattened and left behind her.
She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was assembling her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them, that she had heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the right of an opinion on it. She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir—even at the time it had struck her as funny—at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent companions. Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.
After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.
'Pooh, my dear,' she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women to me. Americans have no social conscience. That's the trouble with you all; rank individualists, every one of you. When the political attitude of the average citizen is that of the ostrich keeping his head in the sand so that he shan't see what the country's coming to, what can you expect of the women? Your arguments don't affect the suffrage question, they merely dismiss America. I shall lose my temper if you trot them out to me.' Miss Buckston never lost her temper, however; other people's opinions counted too little with her for that.
At the end of the first week Althea felt distinctly that though the country, even under these dismal climatic conditions, might be delightful if shared with some people, it was not delightful shared with Miss Buckston. She did not like walking in the rain; she was a creature of houses, cabs and carriages. The sober beauty of blotted silhouettes, and misty, rolling hills at evening when the clouds lifted over the sunset, did not appeal to her. She wished that she had stayed in London; she wished that Helen and Mr. Digby were with her; she was even glad that Aunt Julia and the girls were coming.
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston. Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods. Miss Buckston had a manner of saying rude things in sincere unconsciousness that they could offend anybody. She herself did not take offence easily; she was, as she would have said, 'tough.' But Mrs. Pepperell had all the sensitiveness—for herself and for others—of her race, the British race, highly strung with several centuries of transplantation to an electric climate. If she was rude it was never unconsciously so. After her first talk with Miss Buckston, in which the latter, as was her wont, told her a number of unpleasant facts about America and the Americans, Mrs. Pepperell said to her niece, 'What an intolerable woman!'
'She doesn't mean it,' said Althea feebly.
'Perhaps not,' said Aunt Julia; 'but I intend that she shall see what I mean.'
Althea's feeling was of mingled discomfort and satisfaction. Her sympathies were with Aunt Julia, yet she felt a little guilty towards Miss Buckston, for whom her affection was indeed wavering. Inner loyalty having failed she did not wish outer loyalty to be suspected, and in all the combats that took place she kept in the background and only hoped to see Aunt Julia worst Miss Buckston. But the trouble was that Aunt Julia never did worst her. Even when, passing beyond the bounds of what she considered decency, she became nearly as outspoken as Miss Buckston, that lady maintained her air of cheerful yet impatient tolerance. She continued to tell them that the American wife and mother was the most narrow, the most selfish, the most complacent of all wives and mothers; and, indeed, to Miss Buckston's vigorous virginity, all wives and mothers, though sociologically necessary, belonged to a slightly inferior, more rudimentary species. The American variety, she said, were immersed in mere domesticity or social schemes and squabbles. 'Oh, they talked. I never heard so much talk in all my life as when I was over there,' said Miss Buckston; 'but I couldn't see that they got anything done with it. They had debates about health, and yet one could hardly for love or money get a window open in a train; and they had debates on the ethics of citizenship, and yet you are governed by bosses. Voluble and inefficient creatures, I call them.'
Aunt Julia, conscious of her own honourable career, with its achievements in enlightened philanthropy and its background of careful study, heard this with inexpressible ire; but when she was dragged to the execrable taste of a retaliation, and pointed to the British countryside matron, as they saw her at Merriston—a creature, said Aunt Julia, hardly credible in her complacency and narrowness, Miss Buckston rejoined with an unruffled smile: 'Ah, we'll wake them up. They've good stuff in them—good, staying stuff; and they do a lot of useful work in keeping down Radicalism and keeping up the sentiment of our imperial responsibilities and traditions. They are solid, at all events, not hollow.' And to this poor Aunt Julia, whose traditions did not allow her the retort of sheer brutality, could find no answer.
The absurd outcome of the situation was that Althea and Aunt Julia came to look for succour to the girls. The girls were able—astonishingly so, to cope with Miss Buckston. In the first place, they found her inexpressibly funny, and neither Althea nor Aunt Julia quite succeeded at that; and in the second, they rather liked her; they did not argue with her, they did not take her seriously for a moment; they only played buoyantly about her. A few months before, Althea would have been gravely disturbed by their lack of reverence; she saw it now with guilty satisfaction. Miss Buckston, among