Though not serious, Prudence's injuries confined her to the house for
some time. It proved an irksome time for the members of her family as
well as for herself. She was not patient, and it exasperated her to be
compelled to lie on the sofa, unequal to rising from it and running away
when her sisters, from a sense of duty, installed themselves near her
couch with the sociable intention of keeping her company. They insisted
on her occupying herself with some sewing as a relief to the tedium of
enforced inaction. Prudence hated sewing, and made a demand for books;
whereupon her sisters in turn read aloud to her the works of Miss
Nouchette Carey, which were familiar to Prudence from childhood, and
bored her exceedingly. She wanted something more stimulating; something
which did not depict Wortheton ideals and sentiment. But the more
modern writers were banned as unwholesome, and the poets were
discredited on account of an erotic tendency to idealise passion and
adorn sensuousness with an exalted language better suited to more
spiritual qualities. Or so Miss Agatha thought.
"The merit of a book," she affirmed, "depends upon whether it stands the
test of being read aloud without causing embarrassment to the reader and
to the audience."
"Books never embarrass me," Prudence said, "but occasionally they bore
me. I don't care to read about people who lead the stodgy kind of life
we lead."
"Life is not stodgy," Agatha reproved her. "And it is the same
everywhere."
"God forbid!" ejaculated Prudence, and thereby brought a storm of
horrified reproach upon her head.
On occasions Matilda arrived and spent an afternoon or morning with her,
such an altered Matilda that she appeared to Prudence in the guise of a
stranger. Matilda had emerged since her marriage, and from being a mild
reflection of her eldest sister, reflected now Mr Jones quite brightly
and unconsciously. She echoed him in a feminine note, and quoted him
with unintentional inaccuracy, but with sufficient likeness to recall
the original with unpleasant vividness to Prudence's mind. Usually Mr
Jones was too busy to accompany her.
"The vicar leaves so much to him," Mrs Jones explained. "Ernest hopes
to move from Wortheton shortly."
"I understood that he was greatly attached to his work here," Prudence
said. "He likes the factory and the people."
"He has hopes of a living," Matilda confided, lowering her voice.
"Oh, a living! That's another matter. You'll be quite important."
Matilda looked a little doubtful.
"It's a very poor living," she confessed, "even if he succeeds in
obtaining it. No clergyman without private means could accept it."
"I see." Prudence did see, very clearly. She smiled suddenly. "How
grateful he must feel to you," she added.
Matilda resented this very much in the manner Prudence decided in which
Mr Jones would have resented it.
"That matters only in regard to this particular living," she said.
"Ernest would succeed in any case; he is so clever."
Prudence's accident, with the unfortunate complication which had
effected Major Stotford's entry upon the scene, was used by Agatha,
backed by brother William, as a sufficient reason against future
cycling. Agatha went to an immense amount of trouble in her efforts to
gain her father's veto against Prudence riding again. She persuaded him
to get rid of the bicycle as the surest means of avoiding fresh
misadventures; and rendered him so nervous with her gloomy forebodings
that he did consent to part with the bicycle; but he reserved his veto
against riding until he saw how Prudence viewed a possible prohibition.
He could not deny her pleasure merely because the idea of her riding
made him nervous. Bobby had met with accidents when he first cycled;
but it never had been suggested that Bobby should give up riding from a
fear he might break his neck.
The damaged cycle was disposed of; William saw to that. Agatha
undertook to inform her sister; she also sought to prevail with her to
give up the exercise. She enlarged upon her father's anxiety, so
injurious in the case of a man of his years, and pointed out to Prudence
that duty demanded this sacrifice of her pleasure to his anxious love.
Prudence heard her out in silence, a stony silence which betrayed
nothing of the rage that burned within her breast. With the finish of
the oration her chin tilted aggressively.
"This is your doing," she said.
"It is father's wish," Agatha replied. "The bicycle was sold by his
orders."
"Oh!" Prudence exclaimed, with a gesture of impatience. "I know.
What's the good of talking? I am sick of all this pretence of anxiety.
You hate me to have any enjoyment. You never rest--you never have
rested, from seeking to make my life colourless and dull. You are
satisfied only when you keep me sewing, or working in the parish. Well,
I won't sew any more--for fear I prick my fingers, and I won't work in
the parish either from a nervous dread of having my morals contaminated.
If I can't do the things I like, I won't do the things I don't like
either."
Miss Agatha's anger, if more controlled, was every whit as great as
Prudence's. She gazed down upon her sister where she lay upon the sofa
with eyes of cold dislike. Always they had been antagonistic. She had
resented her father's second marriage bitterly, and had disliked his
young wife: the earlier resentment, and the dislike for Prudence's
mother, influenced her largely in her antagonism towards the child of
the marriage, the child who was dearer to their father than any of his
other children, and who was so unlike the rest. But she had, according
to her own view, conscientiously done her duty by her young sister: the
accusation of jealous injustice stung her; she felt that she had not
merited that.
"You are wicked and ungrateful," she said. "You display a great want of
control, and an unchristian spirit. I hope that later, when you have
given yourself time to reflect, you will regret what you have said. I
confess I don't understand you."
"No," Prudence rejoined. "You never have understood me. I don't
suppose you ever will."
"You are not," Miss Agatha answered shortly, "so complex as you
imagine."
Having nothing further to say, and feeling irritated by the laugh with
which her rebuke was received, she closed the interview by leaving the
room.
But the matter was not ended. Prudence had no intention of allowing it
to rest there. She meant to have it out with her father. He had given
the bicycle to her; he had no right to dispose of it without consulting
her. The business of having it out with him in private was not easy of
accomplishment; she seldom saw him alone, and pride restrained her from
broaching the subject before the others. Matters were complicated by
the arrival of Mr Edward Morgan, who, to Prudence's secret
disappointment, came himself on his firm's business instead of sending a
subordinate. Prudence had very vividly in her memory that former
occasion when Steele visited Wortheton. She recalled their different
meetings, few in number but strangely pleasant and familiar; recalled
too the stolen interview with Steele under her window. She longed to
speak of him to Mr Morgan; but self-consciousness tied her tongue and
made mention of his name too difficult. She waited in the hope that Mr
Morgan would allude to the young man's visit. But Mr Morgan was not
accommodating. He had as a matter of fact almost forgotten Steele's
existence, had entirely forgotten that visit of Steele's to Wortheton
over a year ago. Steele had left Morgan Bros, shortly afterwards and
gone abroad: that, so far as Edward Morgan's interest in him was
concerned, was the finish.
It became plain to Prudence, and to the members of Prudence's family, as
the days passed and Mr Morgan showed no haste to depart, that he was
becoming more than ordinarily interested in herself. He had known her
for years. As a child she had delighted him; as a girl he had found her
amusing; but the woman in her came as a startling revelation, and
carried this middle-aged and rather serious-minded business man out of
his immense abstractions and his rather cumbersome habit of reserve.
He became surprisingly alert and attentive to Prudence's whims. He was
quick to lend a hand when she left her sofa; and he sat beside the sofa
in the evenings, and played chess with her, and taught her card games.
William's amiable efforts to draw him into conversation with himself, or
to entice him into the library, met with no encouragement.
"It's dull for your sister, not being able to get about," he explained.
"We've got to amuse her."
He did amuse her; and he earned her gratitude at the same time. It was
a new and agreeable experience to be considered first and consulted
deferentially and made to feel oneself of some importance. He bought
her chocolates and books, books such as Miss Agatha did not approve of,
and which Prudence read with avidity. She shared her chocolates, but
she kept the books to herself.
"If you only knew what pleasure you give me," she said, on receiving a
volume. And Mr Morgan, looking pleased, answered quietly:
"That's what I want to give you--pleasure."
The next day he gave her another book.
"I don't read novels myself," he explained. "But I demand the best, and
place myself unreservedly in the bookseller's hands. Generally they
know what is worth reading."
Prudence confided in him her trouble over the cycling veto, anticipating
sympathy, and was disappointed in him because he sided with the family
in their objection to her riding. He did not approve of cycling for
ladies, he said. That struck her as a very antiquated prejudice.
Cycling for women was so general until motoring became more popular.
"If father would give me a car," she said, "I should prefer it."
"Better have a pony carriage," he advised, "if you intend driving it
yourself. Safer and pleasanter, really."
"How stodgy!" she said, and laughed. "That's much too slow."
It was regrettable, she reflected, that he was so elderly; and she
wondered what he had been like as a young man, and why he had never
married.
The answer to that question was that, until he met her as a woman, he
had never known love. He knew it now. And he recognised it for the one
passion of his life--a disturbing passion on account of the disparity in
their ages. This disparity he recognised as a barrier, but a barrier
which might be overcome. It is a barrier which many people surmount and
not always unsuccessfully. None the less the undertaking is attended
with risks, and the risks are worthy of consideration. The ideal
marriage is based on equality in essential things. Contemporaneous
ideas and sentiments lend themselves most readily to sympathy. Without
sympathy and understanding a perfect relationship cannot exist. The
individual of forty who fails to recognise this fact deserves no
compassion when he strikes the rocks ahead.