And thus the situation stayed. Patricia told him nothing. And Rudolph
Musgrave, knowing that according to his lights he had behaved not
unhandsomely, was the merest trifle patronizing and rather like a person
speaking from a superior plane in his future dealings with Patricia.
Moreover, he was engrossed at this time by his scholarly compilation of
Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800, which was printed the
following February.
She told him nothing. She was a devoted mother for two days' space, and
then candidly decided that Roger was developing into the most
insufferable of little prigs.
"And, besides, if he had never been born I would quite probably have
lived to keep my teeth in a glass of water at night. And I can't help
thinking of that privilege being denied me whenever I look at him."
She told Rudolph Musgrave nothing. She was finding it mildly amusing to
note how people came and went at Matocton, and to appraise these people
disinterestedly, because she would never see them again.
Patricia was drawing her own conclusions as to Lichfield's aristocracy.
These people--for the most part a preposterously handsome race--were the
pleasantest of companions and their manners were perfection; but there
was enough of old Roger Stapylton's blood in Patricia's veins to make
her feel, however obscurely, that nobody is justified in living without
even an attempt at any personal achievement. The younger men evinced a
marked tendency to leave Lichfield, to make their homes elsewhere, she
noted, and they very often attained prominence; there was Joe Parkinson,
for instance, who had lunched at Oyster Bay only last Thursday,
according to the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_. And, meanwhile, the men of
her husband's generation clung to their old mansions, and were
ornamental, certainly, and were, very certainly, profoundly
self-satisfied; for they adhered to the customs of yesterday under the
comfortable delusion that this was the only way to uphold yesterday's
ideals. But what, in heaven's name, had any of these men of Rudolph
Musgrave's circle ever done beyond enough perfunctory desk-work, say, to
furnish him food and clothes?
"A hamlet of Hamlets," was Patricia's verdict as to Lichfield--"whose
actual tragedy isn't that their fathers were badly treated, but that
they themselves are constitutionally unable to do anything except talk
about how badly their fathers were treated."
No, it was not altogether that these men were indolent. Rudolph and
Rudolph's peers had been reared in the belief that when any manual labor
became inevitable, you as a matter of course entrusted its execution to
a negro; and, forced themselves to labor, they not unnaturally complied
with an ever-present sense of unfair treatment, and, in consequence,
performed the work inefficiently. Lichfield had no doubt preserved a
comely manner of living; but it had produced in the last half-century
nothing of real importance except John Charteris.