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There are some nice ones near Miss Buckston's. 'Oh, don't let us be too near Miss Buckston, said Helen, laughing. 'But surely, Althea, you won't give up Bayreuth, Aunt Julia interposed. 'It is going to be specially fine this year. And then you know so few people in England, you will be very lonely. Nothing is more lonely than the English country when you know nobody.
She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir even at the time it had struck her as funny at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look.
She continued to tell them that the American wife and mother was the most narrow, the most selfish, the most complacent of all wives and mothers; and, indeed, to Miss Buckston's vigorous virginity, all wives and mothers, though sociologically necessary, belonged to a slightly inferior, more rudimentary species.
'How do you like Miss Buckston now that you see her at closer quarters? Althea asked, hoping to approach the subject that preoccupied her by a circuitous method. Helen smiled. 'One hardly likes her better at closer quarters, does one? She is like a gun going off every few moments. Althea smiled too; she no longer felt many qualms of loyalty on Miss Buckston's behalf.
She had fires lighted, much to Miss Buckston's amusement, and sat a good deal by the blaze in the drawing-room, controlling her displeasure when Miss Buckston, dressed in muddy tweed and with a tweed cap pulled down over her brows, came striding in from a ten-mile tramp and said, pulling open all the windows, 'You are frightfully frusty in here.
There was a welcome diversion afforded for her, when Aunt Julia came, by the prompt hostility that declared itself between her and Miss Buckston. Aunt Julia was not a person to allow a steam-roller to pass over her without protest, and Althea felt that she herself had been cowardly when she saw how Aunt Julia resented, for them both, Miss Buckston's methods.
She took every opportunity for talking to him about sociology, science, and international themes, and Althea even became a little irked by the frequency of these colloquies and tempted sometimes to withdraw Franklin from them; but the subtle flattery that Miss Buckston's interest in Franklin offered to herself was too acceptable for her to yield to such impulses.
This had all been tormenting, and Miss Buckston's presence at lunch had been something of a refuge Miss Buckston, far more interested in her Bach choir practice than in Althea's plans, and lending but a preoccupied attention to Miss Robinson's matrimonial talk. Miss Buckston, at a glance, had dismissed Miss Robinson as frothy and shallow. They were both gone now, thank goodness.
Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative. After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly. 'Pooh, my dear, she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women to me.
She had always, till now, found Miss Buckston's cheerful dogmatism fortifying, and, even when it irritated her, instructive; but she had now new standards of interest, and new sources of refreshment, and, shut up with Miss Buckston for a rainy week, she felt as never before the defects of this excellent person's many qualities.
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