Easy, while they were there, to make them the conversation’s centre. But the meal ended and then became most evident her anxiety to keep the chatter on the children. They became impatient to be off on the promised exploration. She delayed it. Twice the clerk who was to conduct the tour was about to be summoned. By a new gathering of general attention, she stopped his coming. When at last he came she said she would be of the party. The partners did not want that. The children did not want it. “Mother, it will be much more exciting by ourselves.” She insisted. She was aware for the first and only time in her life of a feeling of nerves, of not being quite in control of herself, of making of her insistence rather more than should be made.
“Well, stay,” said Mr. Sturgiss, “at least for a minute’s chat before you join them.”
That was not possible, unless she was going to become hysterical, to resist. The children trooped away. Her bodyguard!
She turned aside and it is to be remembered for her that, her face concealed from the partners, she gave the tiniest despairing gesture with her hands.
When, with the children, she was returning home, she was trying to determine whether, while it was in suspense, she had or had not desired to hear of the partners that which she had heard from them. They had talked with her generally of the business. They had talked particularly of the work of her department of the business. There was approaching all the time the thing that sooner or later they must say. She was trembling all the time to know how she would receive it. In whichever of its two ways it came would she be glad or would she be sorry? She simply did not know. She suddenly herself projected the point. She could not endure any longer its delay. “And Miss Farmer,” she said. “How’s Miss Farmer doing?” Miss Farmer, formerly one of her assistants, had on her resignation taken her place.
Miss Farmer, replied Mr. Sturgiss, was estimable but--he opened his hands and made with them a deprecatory gesture. “She’s not you. How could she be you, or any one be you? We could replace Miss Farmer. What’s the good? It’s you we’ve got to replace. We can’t replace you.”
That happened in the Christmas holidays, in January. In February was Doda’s eleventh birthday. The child had friends rather older than herself, neighbours, who for a year had been boarders at a school in Surrey. She was desperately eager to join them there and it was a promise from Rosalie that she should go when she was twelve, earlier if she were good. On this eleventh birthday, which brought birthday letters from the neighbours at the school and thus again brought up the subject, “Oh, haven’t I been good?” cried Doda at the birthday breakfast. “Oh, do let me go next term, mother. Father, do say I may.” Her eagerness for school had been much fostered by Huggo’s holiday stories of school life; and Huggo, as Doda now adduced, was leaving his preparatory and starting at Tidborough next term; couldn’t she, oh, couldn’t she make also her start then?