“Poff,” she cried suddenly, “you're not a SOCIALIST?”
“But these friends of yours--they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties and everything complete.”
“They have ideas,” he evaded. He tried to express it better. “They give one something to take hold of.”
She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him, very seriously. “I hope,” she said with all her heart, “that you will have nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!”
“There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't. You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may spoil so much.... I HATE the way you talk of it.... As if it wasn't all--absolutely--RUBBISH....”
She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends, as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour--and it had always turned out remarkably well.
Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?
“I wish sometimes,” his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note in her voice, “that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.”
“But I'm NOT like my father!” said Benham puzzled.
“No,” she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason, “so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression....”
She jumped to her feet. “Poff,” she said, “I want to go and see the evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't have ideas anyhow. They just pop--as God meant them to do. What stupid things we human beings are!”
Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all that disappointed her in Benham. He had to become the symbol, because she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she had to make things personal, and he was the only personality available. She fretted over his existence for some days therefore (once she awakened and thought about him in the night), and then suddenly she determined to grasp her nettle. She decided to seize and obliterate this Prothero. He must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and conclusively led on, examined, ransacked, shown up, and disposed of for ever. At once. She was not quite clear how she meant to do this, but she was quite resolved that it had to be done. Anything is better than inaction.