Not another word passed between them on the subject of Miss Wadhurst, and Mrs. Wingfield went to her bed in a condition of great uncertainty on the subject of her son and the young woman who was to come to pay her a visit. A farmer's daughter, with views of dairy management; that was rather a curious sort of young person for Jack to take up--if he had taken her up. But Jack was, she knew, like many other young men of whom she had been hearing recently--ready to do the unexpected. It was shocking to hear of them marrying girls who danced and did things. She had not quite succeeded in determining whether dancing or a dairy was the worse. Hadn't some well-known man written a poem about a dairymaid?--or was it a musical comedy? But here was a dairymaid with a romantic story swirling round her like one of those gauzy robes in which some _premiere danseuse_ was accustomed to make her gyrations. Mrs. Wingfield had a horror of being in anyway associated with a person who had had a romance in his or her life. She connected romance with unrespectability just as she did cleverness and scheming.
She sighed at the thought of her son's marrying a dairymaid; but if he had set his heart on marrying her and failed to do so, would he not forthwith start once again upon his wanderings?
Which of the two prospects was to be preferred? That was the question which she had to decide. It was a case of Scylla and Charybdis--_Priscilla and Charybdis_, she thought; but she went asleep before she had made up her mind on this question. After all, was there any reason for her to keep awake thinking if it was possible that her son, who had run the gauntlet of many young women in search of husbands, and many young women--these were the more dangerous--having husbands of their own already, during the previous four years, was now head and ears in love with a red-faced, brownarmed, blowsy dairymaid?
As for her son, he did not go to bed very soon. He had a good deal to think about apart from that grave step which he had taken in the morning--the first important step he had ever taken before breakfast. As a matter of fact, everything that he had to think about he thought about quite apart from his discharging the drowsy and thirsty Mr. Verrall, though to be sure there was a certain connection between the person whom he had in his mind and his recently-acquired zeal to set his household in order.