Moth and Rust | Page 3

the flesh."
"There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might
have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth
married his daughter's maid last week."
"I don't know what I've done," said Mrs. Trefusis, "that my only son
should marry a pretty horse-breaker."
"I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker."
"So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first
met her."
"She rides magnificently. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and
asked who she was."
"Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of
drugging some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was
disgraceful. He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall
have to know him now. The place will be overrun with her relations,
whom I have avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me."
This was a favourite expression of Mrs. Trefusis's. She invariably
spoke as if a curse had hung over her since her birth.
"What does it matter who one knows?" said Anne.
Mrs. Trefusis did not answer. The knots in her face moved a little. She
knew what country life and country society were better than Anne. She
had all her life lived in the upper of the two sets which may be found in
every country neighbourhood. She did what she considered to be her
duty by the secondary set, but she belonged by birth and by inclination
to the upper class. It was at first, with bewildered surprise, and later on
with cold anger, that she observed that her only son, bone of her bone,
very son of herself and her kind dead husband, showed a natural
tendency to gravitate towards the second-rate among their neighbours.

Why did he do it? Why did he bring strange, loud-voiced, vulgar men
to Easthope, the kind of men whom Mr. Trefusis would not have
tolerated? She might have known that her husband would die of
pneumonia just when her son needed him most. She had not expected it,
but she ought to have expected it. Did not everything in her lot go
crooked, while the lives of all those around her went straight? What
was the matter with her son, that he was more at ease with these
undesirable companions than with the Sons of his father's old friends?
Why would he never accompany her on her annual pilgrimage to
London?
George was one of those lethargic, vain men who say they hate London.
Catch them going to London! Perhaps if efforts were made to catch
them there, they might repair thither. But in London they are nobodies;
consequently to London they do not go. And the same man who
eschews London will generally be found to gravitate in the country to a
society in which he is the chief personage. It had been so with George.
Fred Black, the disreputable horse-breaker, and his companions, had
sedulously paid court to him. George, who had a deep-rooted love of
horse-flesh, was often at Fred's training-stables. There he met Janet,
and fell in love with her, as did most of Fred's associates. But unlike
them, George had withdrawn. He knew he should "do" for himself with
"the county" if he married Janet. And he could not face his mother. So
he sulked like a fish under the bank, half-suspicious that he is being
angled for. So ignorant of his fellow-creatures was George that there
actually had been a moment when he suspected Janet of trying to "land
him," and he did not think any the worse of her.
Then, after months of sullen indecision, he suddenly rushed upon his
fate. That was a week ago.
Anne left her chair as Mrs. Trefusis did not answer, and knelt down by
the old woman.
"Dear, Mrs. Trefusis," she said, "the girl is a nice girl, innocent and
good, and without a vestige of conceit."
"She has nothing to be conceited about that I can see."

"Oh! yes. She might be conceited about marrying George. It is an
amazing match for her. And she might be conceited about her beauty. I
should be if I had that face."
"My dear, you are twenty times as good-looking, because you look
what you are--a lady. She looks what she is--a--." Something in Anne's
steady eyes disconcerted Mrs. Trefusis, and she did not finish the
sentence. She twitched her hands restlessly, and then went on:
"And she can't come into a room. She sticks in the door. And she
always calls you 'Lady Varney.' She hasn't called a girl a 'g'un' yet, but I
know she will. I had thought my son's wife might make up to me a little
for all I've gone through--might be a comfort