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Mrs St. George sat waiting at her drawing-room window. Her limitations were so well concealed from the eyes of the average man and woman that almost it might be said that she was without limitations. She cherished a sense of personal dignity, being a woman who looked into no other mirror but her own, and seeing herself in it as Mrs St. George of No. 77 Cardigan Square, and Melfont St. Georges in the county of Dorset. Her dignity had known no falterings, possibly because no impediments had placed themselves successfully in the path of it. She drove her emotions—such as they were—like a team of horses under perfect control.

Even when her husband had been carried in from the hunting-field with a broken back, she had sat with a kind of rigid and consenting calmness beside his bed.

“It’s rather rough on me, Clara—.”

She could remember his wide eyes looking up at her, and suddenly he had turned his face away, and had died strangely and silently without giving her another look or word. That she had failed him in that hour of his bewildering and dreadful darkness seemed to have been beyond her understanding. She did not understand men, the eternal boy in man; she had not understood her husband. Poor, easy, impulsive Charlie St. George! Even at the last she had not understood his look of appeal, or heard the muttered cry of “Mother”. It had not been a happy marriage. She had been so cold and so dominant.

She sat and waited for her son. She watched a sandy-coloured cat stalking sparrows in the sooty shrubberies of the square’s garden. She had possessed her son, or thought that she had possessed him, as she had never possessed her husband, and so confident had her cry of “Mine” become, that in this crisis, when tumultuous circumstances were sweeping her son away from her control, she sat as she had sat beside her dying husband’s bed. She disliked emotion; she was afraid of it; she suppressed it. Anger she would allow herself upon occasions, the anger of a cold and self-cherishing egoist. She realized her crisis, and yet did not realize it in its completeness. Neither did she realize that if one particular emotion is allowed righteous expression, while other emotions are suppressed, that one emotion may become infinitely dangerous. Always, she felt so right when she was angry. Her anger could be a cold blast from which more warmly blooded people shrank and retreated. It had been a very successful emotion, and perhaps that is why it had always seemed so right.

She was angry now. She was angry with the war, and with the Germans, and with the doctors, and also most strangely angry with her son. She had a feeling that somehow he should have contrived to continue physically unfit. She detested interference, interference of any kind. She resented any affair being taken out of her very capable hands. When she sat on a committee,—and she sat on many,—she sat on them in other respects. She was both a St. George and a Smythe.

She was angry with poor Cummins, for Cummins had come into the room with a suggestion of undisciplined emotion.

“Mr Alex’s room, madam.—Shall I light a fire?”

“Of course—light a fire.”

“But cook says,—madam—.”

“The cook—!”

“There is less than a hundredweight of coal—.”

“Very well, it is April, and Mr Alex is a soldier.”

She sat and watched that sandy-coloured cat intent upon its feline adventures. It suggested a sequence of thoughts, compensating reflections. Yes, Alex was still very much hers. He had not been stalked and captured by some young feline creature. He had not lapsed into one of those disastrous war marriages. If he was going out to France he was going out wholly hers. She did not want Alex to marry. She could presume that without her consent he would not be able to marry. He had no profession. The property was hers for life. She allowed her son five hundred a year, and, of course—some day—. But all that was a very long way off, and she need not consider it. She did not consider it.