After lunch Aunt Plessington took her little Madge for an energetic
walk, and showed herself far more observant than the egotism of her
conversation at that meal might have led one to suppose. Or perhaps she
was only better informed. Aunt Plessington loved a good hard walk in the
afternoon; and if she could get any one else to accompany her, then
Hubert stayed at home, and curled up into a ball on a sofa somewhere,
and took a little siesta that made him all the brighter for the
intellectual activities of the evening. The thought of a young life,
new, untarnished, just at the outset, just addressing itself to the task
of getting on, always stimulated her mind extremely, and she talked to
Marjorie with a very real and effectual desire to help her to the utmost
of her ability.
She talked of a start in life, and the sort of start she had had. She
showed how many people who began with great advantages did not shove
sufficiently, and so dropped out of things and weren't seen and
mentioned. She defended herself for marrying Hubert, and showed what a
clever shoving thing it had been to do. It startled people a little, and
made them realize that here was a woman who wanted something more in a
man than a handsome organ-grinder. She made it clear that she thought a
clever marriage, if not a startlingly brilliant one, the first duty of a
girl. It was a girl's normal gambit. She branched off to the things
single women might do, in order to justify this view. She did not think
single women could do very much. They might perhaps shove as
suffragettes, but even there a husband helped tremendously--if only by
refusing to bail you out. She ran over the cases of a number of
prominent single women.
"And what," said Aunt Plessington, "do they all amount to? A girl is so
hampered and an old maid is so neglected," said Aunt Plessington.
She paused.
"Why don't you up and marry Mr. Magnet, Marjorie?" she said, with her
most brilliant flash.
"It takes two to make a marriage, aunt," said Marjorie after a slight
hesitation.
"My dear child! he worships the ground you tread on!" said Aunt
Plessington.
"He's rather--grown up," said Marjorie.
"Not a bit of it. He's not forty. He's just the age."
"I'm afraid it's a little impossible."
"Impossible?"
"You see I've refused him, aunt."
"Naturally--the first time! But I wouldn't send him packing the second."
There was an interval.
Marjorie decided on a blunt question. "Do you really think, aunt, I
should do well to marry Mr. Magnet?"
"He'd give you everything a clever woman needs," said Aunt Plessington.
"Everything."
With swift capable touches she indicated the sort of life the future
Mrs. Magnet might enjoy. "He's evidently a man who wants helping to a
position," she said. "Of course his farces and things, I'm told, make no
end of money, but he's just a crude gift by himself. Money like that is
nothing. With a clever wife he might be all sorts of things. Without one
he'll just subside--you know the sort of thing this sort of man does. A
rather eccentric humorous house in the country, golf, croquet,
horse-riding, rose-growing, queer hats."
"Isn't that rather what he would like to do, aunt?" said Marjorie.
"That's not _our_ business, Madge," said Aunt Plessington with humorous
emphasis.
She began to sketch out a different and altogether smarter future for
the fortunate humorist. There would be a house in a good central
position in London where Marjorie would have bright successful lunches
and dinners, very unpretending and very good, and tempt the clever smart
with the lure of the interestingly clever; there would be a bright
little country cottage in some pretty accessible place to which Aunt and
Uncle Plessington and able and influential people generally could be
invited for gaily recreative and yet extremely talkative and helpful
week-ends. Both places could be made centres of intrigue; conspiracies
for getting on and helping and exchanging help could be organized,
people could be warned against people whose getting-on was undesirable.
In the midst of it all, dressed with all the natural wit she had and an
enlarging experience, would be Marjorie, shining like a rising planet.
It wouldn't be long, if she did things well, before she had permanent
officials and young cabinet ministers mingling with her salad of writers
and humorists and the Plessington connexion.
"Then," said Aunt Plessington with a joyous lift in her voice, "you'll
begin to _weed_ a little."
For a time the girl's mind resisted her.
But Marjorie was of the impressionable sex at an impressionable age, and
there was something overwhelming in the undeviating conviction of her
aunt, in the clear assurance of her voice, that this life which
interested her was the real life, the only possible successful life. The
world reformed itself in Marjorie's fluent mind, until it was all a
scheme of influence and effort and ambition and triumphs. Dinner-parties
and receptions, men wearing orders, cabinet ministers more than a little
in love asking her advice, beautiful robes, a great blaze of lights;
why! she might be, said Aunt Plessington rising to enthusiasm, "another
Marcella." The life was not without its adventurous side; it wasn't in
any way dull. Aunt Plessington to illustrate that point told amusing
anecdotes of how two almost impudent invitations on her part had
succeeded, and how she had once scored off her elder sister by getting a
coveted celebrity through their close family resemblance. "After
accepting he couldn't very well refuse because I wasn't somebody else,"
she ended gleefully. "So he came--and stayed as long as anybody."
What else was there for Marjorie to contemplate? If she didn't take this
by no means unattractive line, what was the alternative? Some sort of
employment after a battle with her father, a parsimonious life, and even
then the Oxbridge tradesmen and their immortal bills....
Aunt Plessington was so intent upon her theme that she heeded nothing of
the delightful little flowers she trampled under foot across the down,
nor the jolly squirrel with an artistic temperament who saw fit to give
an uninvited opinion upon her personal appearance from the security of a
beech-tree in the wood. But Marjorie, noting quite a number of such
things with the corner of her mind, and being now well under the
Plessington sway, wished she had more concentration....
In the evening after supper the customary games were suspended, and Mr.
and Mrs. Plessington talked about getting on, and work and efficiency
generally, and explained how so-and-so had spoilt his chances in life,
and why so-and-so was sure to achieve nothing, and how this man ate too
much and that man drank too much, and on the contrary what promising and
capable people the latest adherents of and subscribers to the Movement
were, until two glasses of hot water came--Aunt Plessington had been
told it was good for her digestion and she thought it just as well that
Hubert should have some too--and it was time for every one to go to bed.