The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp Page B

grandmother said something—?”
    Susan looked up from her flowers.
    â€œThat’s Uncle William. He isn’t an uncle really, of course, but I’ve always called him that. He’s a dear. He’s coming the day after to-morrow.”
    â€œTo inspect me,” observed Bryan from the doorway.
    Julia ignored the interruption.
    â€œSir William, isn’t he?” she asked.
    â€œSir William Waring. He was a great friend of Grandfather’s.”
    That made him seventy at least, thought Julia gloomily. Men of seventy had no interest for her: they were always, in her experience, either doddering or spry; and the spry were the worst.
    â€œAbout fifty-one,” said Bryan, who had been watching her face.
    Julia ignored him again.
    â€œAnd have you,” she asked Susan cunningly, “an Auntie as well?”
    â€œUnmarried,” said Bryan.
    Susan glanced at him sharply. “Are you meaning,” said that look—and a very Packett look it was—“to make fun of my mother? I do not suspect you,” said that look, “of deliberate impertinence; but aren’t you a little forgetting yourself?”
    Warm gratitude flooded Julia’s breast; it was sweet to be so protected by one’s daughter, and for a moment that sweetness was all she felt. Then under her pleasure, marring it, stirred a feeling of guilt, almost of shame. For she didn’t deserve such protection: Susan was wrong, and Bryan right. Bryan, because his own thoughts no doubt worked the same way, knew what she, Julia, was getting at: Susan’s lovely mind never even suspected it. Yet from all this complication of wrongs and rights emerged one certain good: Susan had, possibly for the first time, recognized and admitted in her lover something alien to herself.
    â€œShe’s never seen him against his own background,” thought Julia. “It’s queer that I should be it.” She looked at her daughter’s stern face, and at once Susan smiled. It was the most loving smile Julia had ever received from her. “Let her find him out without finding me out too,” prayed Julia selfishly; “I shan’t be here long, O Lord!”
    â€œLady Waring,” said Susan, addressing herself pointedly to her mother, “died about ten years ago. I hardly remember her, except that she was very nice. They never had any children: I expect that was why they made such a fuss of me.”
    â€œIt must be dreadful to have no children, with a title,” said Julia seriously. “It seems such waste.”
    Susan laughed. Like a good schoolmistress, she knew that severity should be tempered with kindness, and having properly frozen the atmosphere, she now proceeded to thaw it again.
    â€œUncle William isn’t a baronet—he’s a mere knight. He was something in the Admiralty, and they knighted him after the war. Will you have roses for your room, or a tangle?”
    â€œA tangle,” said Julia. She still liked the roses best, but she wanted to show her gratitude.
    Bryan lounged in and swung himself onto the table.
    â€œWhat about me?” he asked. “What about my room?”
    â€œYou’ve flowers enough,” said Susan. “You’ve still the whole bunch we picked yesterday.”
    â€œBut I want one now, from you. Give me a rose, Susan.”
    Flushed, smiling, very pretty, she broke off a yellow bud. Bryan received it with suitable gratitude. But his eyes were not on Susan; they looked over her shoulder, at Julia, with defiance.
    2
    That afternoon, immediately after lunch, Julia set out to look at a tree. Both Susan and Mrs. Packett were able to contemplate trees for minutes together, and her natural spirit of emulation made Julia covet the same power. There must, she thought, be something in it: some esoteric connection between garden-seats and the gentility she so much admired. For her daughter and mother-in-law were by no means isolated