‘By all means, if you like.’

Then Aunt Cynthia chased off after another exciting subject, and that was all about Gideon.

2

I came away early (about eleven, that is, which is very early for one of Chloe’s evenings, which don’t end till summer dawn) feeling more worried than ever about Gideon.  If the gossip about him had penetrated from Lady Pinkerton’s circle to my aunt’s, it must be pretty widespread.  I was angry with Aunt Cynthia, and a little with every one I had met that evening.  They were so cheerful, so content with things as they were, finding all the world such a screaming farce....  I sometimes get my family on my nerves, when I go there straight from Covent Garden and its slum babies, and see them spending and squandering and being irresponsible and dissolute and not caring twopence for the way two-thirds of the world live.  There was Wycombe to-night, with a long story to tell me about his debts and his amours (he’s going to be co-respondent in a divorce case directly), and Chloe, as hard as nails beneath her pretty ways, and simply out for a good time, and Aunt Cynthia, with half the gossip of London spouting out of her like a geyser, and Diana, who might turn out fine beyond description or degenerate into a mere selfish rake (it won’t be my father’s and Chloe’s fault if she doesn’t do the latter), and my Uncle Ferdinand in purple and fine linen, a prince of the Church, and Tony already booked for a political career, with his chief’s shady secrets in his keeping to show him the way it’s done.  And they bandied about among them the name of a man who was worth the lot of them together, and repeated silly rhymes which might hang him....  It was a little more than I could stand.

One is so queer about one’s family.  I’m inclined to think every one is.  Often I fit in with mine perfectly, and love to see them, and find them immensely refreshing after Covent Garden and parish shop.  And then another time they’ll be on my nerves and I feel glad I’m out of it all.  And another time again I’m jealous of them, and wish I had Wycombe’s or Tony’s chances of doing something in the world other than what I am doing.  That, of course, is sheer vulgar covetousness and grab.  It comes on sometimes when I am tired, or bored, and the parish seems stale, and the conferences and committees I attend unutterably profitless, and I want more clever people to talk to, and bigger and more educated audiences to preach to, and I want to have leisure to write more and to make a name....  It is merely a vulgar disease—­a form of Potterism.  One has to face it and fight it out.

But to-night I wasn’t feeling that.  I wasn’t feeling anything very much, except that Gideon, and all that Gideon stood for, was worth immeasurably more than anything the Aylesbury lot had ever stood for.

And when I got back, I found a note from Katherine saying that she had warned Gideon about the talk and that he wasn’t proposing to take any steps.