The Major’s role, however, was on the whole that of listener.  For Elizabeth meant to talk—­meant to explain herself to the son and heir, and, if she could, to drive him to an interest in the family affairs.  To her trained, practical mind the whole clan seemed by now criminally careless and happy-go-lucky.  The gardens were neglected; so was the house; so was the estate.  The gardens ought to have been made self-supporting; there were at least a third too many servants in the house; and as for the estate, instead of being a profit-making and food-producing concern, as it should have been, it was a bye-word for bad management and neglected land.  She did not pretend to know much about it yet; but what she did know roused her.  England was at grips with a brutal foe.  The only weapon that could defeat her was famine—­the sloth and waste of her own sons.  This woman, able, energetic, a lover of her country, could not conceal her scorn for such a fatal incompetence.  Naturally, in talking to the eldest son, she made the agent her scapegoat for the sins of the owner.  The Squire’s responsibility was carefully masked.  But Aubrey Mannering perfectly understood what she would be at.  She was a clever woman who wanted things improved.  Well, let her improve them.  It did not matter to him.

But she appeared to him as a somewhat special type of the modern woman, with her advanced education and her clear brain; and for a time he observed her curiously.  The graceful dress, pale blue with touches of black, which exactly became her fair skin, the bright gold of her hair, and the pleasant homeliness of her face—­her general aspect indeed—­attracted him greatly.  She might know Greek; at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a background of bright pots and pans, mopping tiled floors.

But presently he ceased to pay much attention to her.  His dreamy sense became aware of the scene as a whole; the long table; his father’s fantastic figure at the head of it; Alice Gaddesden elaborately dressed and much made up on the one side, his sister Margaret in a high black gown, erect and honest, on the other; Desmond and Pamela together, chatting and chaffing with the Rector.  It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the beautiful Hogarth head—­their best possession—­that was so like Pamela.  The furniture of the room was of many different dates—­incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly.  The Mannerings of the past had not been an artistic lot.

Nor had the room—­the house indeed—­many tender associations for him.  His childhood had not been very happy.  He had never got on with his father, and his mother, who had been the victim of various long illnesses during his boyhood, had never, unluckily, meant much to him.  He knew that he was of a very old stock, which had played a long and considerable part in the world; but the fact brought him no thrill.  ‘That kind of thing is played out,’ he thought.  Let his father disinherit him—­he was quite indifferent.