"I don't really know," she said. "How many are there of you, Hawkins?"
Lady Ellington sniffed rather contemptuously.
"The labour-sheet will tell you," she said. "Why are there no flower borders on this lawn?"
"Ah, that is Philip's plan," said his mother, delighted to be able to refer the inquisitor to another source. "He says that they get so trampled by people looking for balls."
"I should have thought wire-netting would have obviated that," said Lady Ellington. "Under the north wall there is an excellent aspect. Personally, I should put bulbs here. And the rose garden is below, is it not? Certainly Mr. Home keeps his garden in fairly good order."
This concession, though not altogether unqualified, was fully appreciated by Mrs. Home.
"I'm sure he spends enough on it," she said.
"That is the surest way of getting satisfactory results," she said. "It is all nonsense to say that flowers do best in the gardens of those that love them, unless that love takes the practical form of spending money on them. And in the latter case, they do equally well if you hate them!"
This was in the best Ellingtonian manner, hard and clean-cut and glittering--there was nothing foggy about it--and it represented very fairly Lady Ellington's method of dealing with life. Love or hatred did not seem to her to matter very particularly; the dinner of herbs, at any rate, in the house of love was markedly less attractive to her than the well-ordered house of hate, and she could do without friends better than without a motor-car. She had had rather a hard tussel with life, and shrewd blows had been given on both sides; she had lost her money and her husband during the last few years, and, being without a son, the title and estates had gone to her husband's nephew, a man for whom for years she had felt, and indeed shown, an extreme dislike. Her jointure was narrow, and she had only got her motor-car by the simple expedient of ordering it but not paying for it. But of the two combatants--life and herself--life was at last beginning to get the worst of it. Certain speculations she had lately indulged in had brought her in money, and if once she could marry her daughter to Philip, she felt that this would be a knock-down blow to life, and her struggles on this side of the grave would be over. What might happen on the other side concerned her very little.