"Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Chadwick, and Oldmeadow blessed her antidote to the suffocating sweetness: "I'm afraid I don't! I don't think I know anything about risks and dangers; or about conquest either. I'm sure I've never conquered anything; though I have been dreadfully afraid of ill-tempered servants--if that counts, and never let them see it. Barbara had such an odious nurse. She tried, simply, to keep me out of the nursery; but she didn't succeed. And there was a Scotch cook once, with red hair--that so often goes with a bad temper, doesn't it? Do you remember, Barney?--your dear father had to go down to the kitchen when she was found lying quite, quite drunk under the table. But cooks and nurses can't be called risks--and I've never cared for hunting."
Miss Toner was quietly laughing, and indeed everybody laughed.
"Dear Mrs. Chadwick," she said. And then she added: "How can a mother say she has not known risks and dangers? I think you've thought only of other people for all your life and never seen yourself at all. Alpine passes aren't needed to prove people's courage and endurance."
Oldmeadow now saw, from the sudden alarm and perplexity of Mrs. Chadwick's expression, that she was wondering if the marvellous guest alluded to the perils of child-birth. Perhaps she did. She was ready, he imagined, to allude to anything.
"You're right about her never having seen herself," said Palgrave, nodding across at Miss Toner. "She never has. She's incapable of self-analysis."
"But she's precious sharp when it comes to analysing other people, aren't you, Mummy dear!" said Barney.
"I don't think she is," said Meg. "I think Mummy sees people rather as she sees flowers; things to be fed and staked and protected."
"You're always crabbing Mummy, Meg. It's a shame!--Isn't it a shame, Mummy dear!" Barbara protested, and Barney tempered the apparent criticism--peacemaker as he usually was--with: "But you have to understand flowers jolly well to make them grow. And we do her credit, don't we!"
Miss Toner looked from one to the other as they spoke, with her clear, benignant, comprehending gaze, and Mrs. Chadwick stared with her March Hare ingenuousness that had its full share, too, of March Hare shrewdness. She undertook no self-justification, commenting merely, in the pause that followed Barney's contribution: "I don't know what you mean by self-analysis unless it's thinking about yourself and mothers certainly haven't much time for that. You're quite right there, my dear," she nodded at Miss Toner, adding in a tone intended specially for her: "But young people often exaggerate things that are quite, quite simple when they come."