The Partnership Read Free

of a vacant house in Cromwell Place adjoining his own newly built residence, Charles’s own inclination—seemed to point to a retirement from active ministry, to a settlement in Hudley and a comparatively leisured life of lecturing, coaching backward youths for examinations, and taking occasional Sunday duty for his brother ministers in the neighbourhood. He had taken this step, and had not so far regretted it; Lydia had been fortunate in securing a post as secretary to the Principal of a neighbouring theological college; and the Mellors had by now settled down into their usual busy, well-regulated life of meetings, lectures, social work, and general usefulness. Needless to say, their elders’ pasts were sealed books to the three members of the younger generation; Wilfred was a particularly loyal son and brother, and if Lydia occasionally ventured to criticize her uncle to herself, it was on the score of present roughnesses which offended her fastidious taste, rather than of past misdeeds.
    â€œAnd what’s all this mean, Lydia?” he was asking her now, indicating, with the hand which held his cigar, the straps and badges of her uniform.
    Lydia explained her official position in relation to her troop of “Brownies.”
    At this her uncle said nothing, but the reflectioncould be read in his face that in his heyday young women had had something better to think about than Brownies—or worse, as his brother-in-law would probably put it. He smiled a rather cynical smile which Lydia knew and disliked, and remained silent for a while, finishing his cigar. Mr. Dyson did not, as a matter of fact, admire his niece. Her figure seemed to him angular and bad, and she walked in quick short steps, which, when she was in a hurry—and she was almost always in a hurry—became a ridiculous fussy pattering which Mr. Dyson particularly detested in a woman. Then there was a deplorable absence of style in her toilets—her skirts were always too short or too long, too wide or too narrow, for the prevailing fashion—and what was worse, she seemed unconscious of it. She dressed her abundant dark hair badly, too, and the rather simple and conscientious expression of her face annoyed Mr. Dyson, while, like her father’s, it commanded his unwilling respect. Various personal mannerisms of hers, too—her superior little smile, her soft careful enunciation, her silly habit of calling her mother by her Christian name—irritated the robust realism of Mr. Dyson’s character. In a word, he thought Lydia old-maidish, and put it down to her unsuitable upbringing by her father, that absurdly inexperienced and unpractical, though lovable, Charles—Louise, of course, in Mr. Dyson’s view, was a mere looker-on at life’s game, a spectator who did not count. It was always a marvel to him thatLouise had surrendered her detachment sufficiently to marry and bear a child; and it corroborated his view of her that she seemed to have left no traces of herself in her daughter.
    â€œIt’s a pity you don’t smoke, Charles,” he observed after these reflections, throwing the stub of his cigar into the glowing fire.
    â€œIt’s a pity you do,” riposted his brother-in-law immediately.
    The two had sparred together thus for thirty years, and to do so now gave them a pleasant feeling of youth renewed and old times restored. The Reverend Charles laughed heartily, throwing back his silvery head; Mr. Dyson emitted a single sharp bark; Eric sniggered in his corner; the gentle Louise looked up from her knitting with an air of dreamy pleasure; and Lydia, not to be out of key with the rest, forced her lips into a prim little smile, though she felt obscurely irritated. Her uncle’s attitude to life combined with that of the spectators by the schoolyard wall to wound and depress her; she remembered that she was tired and had a host of small duties to perform before she could leave early in