"Very well," he said quietly. "If you feel like that about it, there's no more to be said. It's damned awkward for me, but I suppose I took too much on myself."
The Squire immediately recrossed the line, on the other side of which only opposition could possibly make him wish to keep his footing. "Oh, well," he said, "of course I don't say--in this instance--what I mean is--well, look here, Dick, I don't say anything one way or the other. I'll say this, my boy, you've never given me the slightest trouble, and we've always seen eye to eye in pretty well everything, and where we haven't at first you have always come to see that I was right in the end--eh? Better let me think the question over--what? I don't want you to feel you can't ask your friends to this house, which will be your own some day."
"I can hardly help feeling that, can I?" said Dick, with a short laugh.
"Eh? Well, I must think it over, and talk it over with your mother. You'd better think it over too, old boy. I can't help thinking you'll feel you haven't been very wise. We're Clintons of Kencote, you know. We owe something to ourselves."
But Dick could stand no more. "All right," he said, rising. "I think I'll go up and have a bath before dinner. I'm a bit stiff."
Dick went out of the room angry with himself, angry with his father, and still more angry with his brother. He wanted to meet Humphrey and have it out with him, and he knew that Humphrey at that hour--about seven o'clock--would be in the smoking-room. But he went upstairs, not because he wanted a bath before dinner as he had told his father, and certainly not because he was stiff after trotting a dozen miles or so along the roads, but because he knew that it was not wise to have anything out with anybody unless you had complete command over yourself. So he went into his big comfortable bedroom, where a bright fire was burning, lit some candles, and threw himself into an easy-chair to think matters out.
That his father would give way, that he was already in process of giving way, he was well assured. He knew how to work that all right, and he had taken no false step, as far as he could remember, in dealing with him. But that little fact of Virginia's having once danced on the stage, of which she had told him in the early days of their friendship, as she had told him everything else about her varied, unhappy life, he had never thought that he--and she--would have to face. If it had not been for that, his father, so he told himself, would have given way already. Knowing it, it was surprising that he had left anything to be said on the subject at all. He need never have known it; so few people did know it, even in London, where Virginia was beginning to be well known, or in Leicestershire, where she was very well known indeed. Of course, Humphrey knew it--he knew all that sort of gossip about everybody--and Dick's anger against him began to burn as he imagined the way in which he would have let it out. He was like a spiteful old woman, fiddling about in drawing-rooms, whispering scandal into other old women's ears and receiving it into his own in return.