"Eleanor told you?"
"By way of showing that they think of--things in general."
The bishop reflected. "She wants to go to College."
"They want to go in a set."
"I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She"s eighteen--?
But I will talk to her...."
(10)
All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday"s child until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained wrist.
"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had described her, a little girl in a sc.r.a.pe. But she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she had more of her father"s st.u.r.dy build, and she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under her own control.
"Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself," she began.
"No," said the bishop, weighing it. "No. But you seem to have been indiscreet, little Norah."
"I got excited," she said. "They began turning out the other women--roughly. I was indignant."
"You didn"t go to interrupt?" he asked.
She considered. "No," she said. "But I went."
He liked her disposition to get it right. "On that side," he a.s.sisted.
"It isn"t the same thing as really meaning, Daddy," she said.
"And then things happened?"
"Yes," she said to the fire.
A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would have said, "That is my case, my lord." The bishop prepared to open the next stage in the proceedings.
"I think, Norah, you shouldn"t have been there at all," he said.
"Mother says that."
"A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it wasn"t the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give you freedom--more freedom than most girls get--because we think you will use it wisely. You knew--enough to know that there was likely to be trouble."
The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. "I don"t think that I oughtn"t to know the things that are going on."
The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they had reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.
"Don"t you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that you should begin to know--this or that?"
The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her mind and tried a different beginning.
"I think that every one must do their thinking--his thinking--for--oneself," she said awkwardly.
"You mean you can"t trust--?"
"It isn"t trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry."
"And you find yourself hungry?"
"I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and things means."
"And we starve you--intellectually?"
"You know I don"t think that. But you are busy...."
"Aren"t you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all--you are barely eighteen.... We have given you all sorts of liberties."
Her silence admitted it. "But still," she said after a long pause, "there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk about--oh, all sorts of things. Freely...."
"You"ve been awfully good to me," she said irrelevantly. "And of course this meeting was all pure accident."
Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
"What exactly do you want, Eleanor?" he asked.
She looked up at him. "Generally?" she asked.
"Your mother has the impression that you are discontented."
"Discontented is a horrid word."
"Well--unsatisfied."
She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her demand.
"I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville--and work. I feel--so horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should go--"
"Ye--es," said the bishop and reflected.
He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the memory of these utterances hampered him.
"You could read here," he tried.