The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental condition, when she realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it was no longer possible for her son to make a respectable marriage with a woman of his own nation.  The unadorned fact was that both she and Sir Nigel were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in comprehending that it was proper that the money her father allowed her should be placed in her husband’s hands, and left there with no indelicate questioning.  If she had been an English girl matters would have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily before her marriage.  Sir Nigel’s mother considered that he had played the fool, and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy, sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.

They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and in a measure it was the vicaress who aided them.  Not she entirely, however.

Since her mother-in-law’s first mention of a possible son whose wife would eventually thrust her from her seat at the head of the table, Rosalie had several times heard this son referred to.  It struck her that in England such things seemed discussed with more freedom than in America.  She had never heard a young woman’s possible family arranged for and made the subject of conversation in the more crude atmosphere of New York.  It made her feel rather awkward at first.  Then she began to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty also; that she was expected to provide one, and that he was in some way expected to provide for the estate—­to rehabilitate it—­and that this was because her father, being a rich man, would provide for him.  It had also struck her that in England there was a tendency to expectation that someone would “provide” for someone else, that relatives even by marriage were supposed to “make allowances” on which it was quite proper for other persons to live.  Rosalie had been accustomed to a community in which even rich men worked, and in which young and able-bodied men would have felt rather indignant if aunts or uncles had thought it necessary to pension them off as if they had been impotent paupers.  It was Rosalie’s son who was to be “provided for” in this case, and who was to “provide for” his father.

“When you have a son,” her mother-in-law had remarked severely, “I suppose something will be done for Nigel and the estate.”

This had been said before she had been ten days in the house, and had set her not-too-quick brain working.  She had already begun to see that life at Stornham Court was not the luxurious affair it was in the house in Fifth Avenue.  Things were shabby and queer and not at all comfortable.  Fires were not lighted because a day was chilly and gloomy.  She had once asked for one in her bedroom and her mother-in-law had reproved her for indecent extravagance in a manner which took her breath away.