4

I met Lady Pinkerton and her elder daughter in the muzzle department of the Army and Navy Stores the next week.  That was one of the annoying aspects of the muzzling order; one met in muzzle shops people with whom neither temperament nor circumstances would otherwise have thrown one.

I have a particular dislike for Lady Pinkerton, and she for me.  I hate those cold, shallow eyes, and clothes drenched in scent, and basilisk pink faces whitened with powder which such women have or develop.  When I look at her I think of all her frightful books, and the frightful serial she has even now running in the Pink Pictorial, and I shudder (unobtrusively, I hope), and look, away.  When she looks at me, she thinks ‘dirty Jew,’ and she shudders (unobtrusively, too), and looks over my head.  She did so now, no doubt, as she bowed.

‘Dreadfully tahsome, this muzzling order,’ she said, originally.  ’We have two Pekingese, a King Charles, and a pug, and their poor little faces don’t fit any muzzle that’s made.’

I answered with some inanity about my mother’s Poltalloch, and we talked for a moment.  She said she hoped I was quite all right again, and I suppose I said I was, with my leg shooting like a gathered tooth (it was pretty bad all that spring).

Suddenly I felt her wanting badly to tell me the news about Jane.  She wanted to tell me because she thought she would be scoring off me, knowing that what she would call my ‘influence’ over Jane had always been used against all that Hobart stands for.  I felt her longing to throw me the triumphant morsel of news—­’Jane has deserted you and all your tiresome, conceited, disturbing clique, and is going to marry the promising young editor of her father’s chief paper.’  But something restrained her.  I caught the advance and retreat of her intention, and connected it with her daughter, who stood by her, silent, with an absurd Pekingese in her arms.

Anyhow, Lady Pinkerton held in her news, and I left them.  I dislike Lady Pinkerton, as I have said; but on this occasion I disliked her a little less than usual, for that maternal instinct which had robbed her of her triumph.

5

I went to see Katherine Varick that evening.  I often do when I have been meeting women like Lady Pinkerton, because there is a danger that that kind of woman, so common and in a sense so typical, may get to bulk too large in one’s view of women, and lead one into the sin of generalisation.  So many women are such very dreadful fools—­men too, for that matter, but more women—­that one needs to keep in pretty frequent touch with those who aren’t, with the women whose brains, by nature and training, grip and hold.  Of these, Katherine Varick has as fine and keen a mind and as good a head as any I know.  She isn’t touched anywhere with Potterism; she has the scientific temperament.  Katherine and I are great friends.  From the first she did a good deal of work for the Fact—­reviews of scientific books, mostly.  I went to see her, to get the taste of Lady Pinkerton out of my mouth.