You see, Cornelia, here we have to keep rather quiet and lift a gallant head—_Noblesse oblige_ has to be the watchword. This for two reasons, that so many people require bolstering, who if they detected any weakening in this direction would feel that the front line had broken.
Then it is necessary for our inward life. You know how much I have been through, and unless I had held my head high right along why then, it would just have meant the end of all things. But oh, how we can be misunderstood!
In the dark days of 1910 I met a woman in the street about three months after the Boy had passed, and after we had exchanged greetings she remarked with a charming smile, "How nice that you have got over it so easily." My smile was a little sickly as I replied steadily, "Yes, isn’t it very nice?"
I did not see anything very clearly for quite a while after I had passed on.
Just for a moment, I wondered whether it had been all wrong to bury that irreparable loss so deep that nobody suspected its existence, as a loss. I had been rather proud because I had been able to "carry on," but these careless words suddenly awoke in me a passion of remorse lest I had been disloyal to his precious memory. Then I just laughed weakly as I wiped my nose and eyes. Am I not his mother, and do mothers ever forget or prove disloyal? Another of "that sort of person" said to me on the morning of the raid as I was hurrying to the bank to get some money, "So sorry; you _have_ had bad luck, haven’t you, since you came here?" Have we, I wonder? And what is luck anyway? You and I both know there is no such thing.
There have been developments since I wrote you, chiefly regarding our tenancy of the North House. It happens that under the terms of our English lease we are responsible for this damage, and will have to rebuild for the proprietor at our own expense. Preposterous, you exclaim! So do we, and Himself has got his mind firmly made up that he will fight it out. Some of our advisers would like us to take it to the law courts and make a test case of it, but our adviser-in-chief—that dear friend and great law lord who made such fun of your Nipigon fishing story at our big dinner party, is strongly against it. He says, "Pay up whatever it costs. The case simply bristles with litigious points and I see it going on indefinitely and finally coming up before me at the House of Lords." Himself is in fighting trim, however, and the decision will rest with him.