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They couldn't understand her, of course, being so different to the others." I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details. His insistence on Brenda's difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it.
And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my dulled powers of apprehension.
She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I had imagined.
But the sight was enough to throw the affair into a new perspective, and beget in me a sense of contempt for all the actors in that midsummer comedy. "A plague on both your houses," I muttered to myself, but I saw them no longer as the antagonists of a romantic drama. I was suddenly influenced to a mood of scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration.
I cared nothing for the Jervaises' opinion, but I resented the unfairness of it and had all the innocent man's longing to prove his innocence a feat that was now become for ever impossible. By accepting Banks's invitation, I had confirmed the worst suspicions the Jervaises could possibly have harboured against me.
"You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?" she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic. "I heard that she had been a governess. I didn't know that she had ever been with the Jervaises," I said. "She was there for over two years," pursued Anne.
Perhaps I was still a little dazed by sleep, for I was under the impression that any kind of explanation would be quite hopeless, and I had, then, no intention of offering any. All I wanted was to be taken to Hurley Junction; to get back to town and forget the Jervaises' existence. Banks's change of expression when I laughed began to enlighten my fuddled understanding.
"And yet," I said, as my companion paused, "the Jervaises aren't anything particular as a family. They haven't done anything, even in the usual way, to earn ennoblement or fame." "They've squatted," Banks said, "that's what they've done. Set themselves down here in the reign of Henry II., and sat tight ever since grabbing commons and so on, now and again, in the usual way, of course.
No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and myself added still another to their many sources of irritation. I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep. My one longing was to get back, alone, into the night.
The Jervaises owed me that; and I could leave the car at some hotel at Hurley and send the Jervaises a telegram. I began to compose that telegram in my mind as I threw off the tarpaulin preparatory to starting the car. But Providence was only laughing at me.
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