Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. “Hang it all, Mother,” he objected, “it’s such a messy day for planting bulbs!” “Nonsense,” said Lady Staines firmly, “I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don’t you, you can get the dirt off then? It’s a perfect day for bulbs as you’d know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There’s another trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin.” Winn strode off to the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and Judy show.

In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn’t hit out all round if the other person wouldn’t hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their armor as easily as milk slips into a glass. It was Lady Staines and Winn who were the deadly fighters.

They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.

It was difficult to say what they fought for but it was a magnificent spectacle to see them fight, and they had for each other a regard which, if it was never tender, had every element of respect.

They worked now for some time in silence. Suddenly Lady Staines cocked a wintry blue eye in her son’s direction and remarked, “Why ain’t your wife going with you to Davos?” Winn hurled a bulb into the small hole prepared for it before answering, then he said:

“She’s too delicate to stand the cold.”

“Is there anything the matter with her?” asked his mother.

Winn preferred to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn’t going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. “Marriage don’t seem to have agreed with either of you particularly well,” observed Lady Staines with a grim smile.

“We haven’t got your constitution,” replied her son. “If either you or Father had married any one else – they’d have been dead within six months.”

“Humph!” said his mother. “That only shows our sound judgment; we took what we could stomach! It’s her look-out of course, but I suppose she knows she’s running you into the Divorce Court, letting you go out there by yourself? All those snow places bristle with grass widows and girls who have outstayed their market and have to get a hustle on! Sending a man out there alone is like driving a new-born lamb into a pack of wolves!” Lady Staines with her eye on the heavily built and rather leathery lamb beside her gave a sardonic chuckle. Winn ignored her illustration.

“You needn’t be afraid,” he replied. “I’m done with women; they tempt me about as much as stale sponge cakes.”

“Ah!” said his mother, “I’ve heard that tale before. A man who says he’s done with women simply means one of them’s done with him. Besides, you’re to be an invalid, I understand! An invalid man is as exposed to women as a young chicken to rats. You won’t stand a ghost of a chance. Look at your father, if I left him alone when he was having an attack of gout with a gray-haired matron of a reformatory, he’d be on his knees to her before I could get back.”

“You can take it from me,” said Winn, “that even if I should need such a thing as a petticoat, I’d try a kind that won’t affect marriage. I’ll never look at another good woman again – the other sort will do for me if I can’t stick it without.”

“Don’t racket too much,” said Lady Staines, planting her last bulb with scientific skill. “They say keeping women’s very expensive up there – on account of the Russian Princes.”

“By the by,” said Winn, “thanks for the money. Had any difficulty in extracting it?”

“Not much,” said Lady Staines, withdrawing to the lawn. “Charles got rather in the way.”

“Silly ass,” observed Winn. “Didn’t want me to have it, I suppose?”

“No, he did want you to have it,” replied Lady Staines, “but he needn’t have been such a fool as to have said so. It nearly upset everything. His idea was, you see, that if his father gave you something – he and James would have to be bought off. So they were in the end, but they’d have had more if he’d played his hand better.”

Winn laughed. “Jolly to be home again,” he remarked. “Dinner as usual?”

“Yes,” said Lady Staines, “and don’t forget one of the footmen’s a Plymouth Brother and mustn’t be shocked. It’s so difficult to get any one nowadays, one mustn’t be too particular. He said he could stand your father by constant prayer, but he gave notice over Charles. Charles ought to have waited till dessert to let himself go.”

The dinner passed off well. Sir Peter and Winn had one never failing bone of contention, the rival merits of the sister services. Sir Peter expressed on every possible occasion in his son’s presence, a bitter contempt for the army, and Winn never let an opportunity pass without pointing out the gorged and pampered state of the British Navy.

“If we’d had half the money spent on us, Sir, that you keep guzzling over,” Winn cheerfully threw out, “we could knock spots out of Europe. The trouble with England is – she treats her sailors as if they were the proud sisters – and we are shoved out like Cinderella into the scullery to do all the dirty work.”

“Pooh!” said Sir Peter, “work! Is that what you call it – takin’ a horse out for an hour or two, and shoutin’ at a few men on a parade ground. What’s an army good for – even when it’s big enough to be seen with the naked eye and capable of attacking a few black savages with their antiquated weapons. Why you’re safe, that’s what you are – dead safe! Land’s beneath you – immovable – you can get anywhere you want to as easy as sliding down banisters! Targets keep still too! It’s nothing to hit a thing you can stand to fire at while it stands still to be fired at! Child’s play, that’s what it is. Look at us, something up all the time, peace or war. We’ve got the sea to fight – wind too – and thick weather. We’ve got our pace to mind and if we ever did clinch up we’d have to do our fighting at a rate that’d make an express train giddy – and running after a target goin’ as hard as we do! That’s what I call something of a service. No! No! The Army’s played out. You’re for ornament now, meant to go round Buckingham Palace and talk to nurse-maids in the Park.”

“Not many nurse-maids in the Kyber Pass,” his son observed.

“Frontiers – yes, I dare say,” snorted Sir Peter. “A few black rag dolls behind trees popping at you to keep your circulation going, and you with Maxims and all, going picnics in the hills and burning down villages as easy as pulling fire-crackers – and half the time you want help from us! Look at South Africa!”

They looked at South Africa for some time till the dessert came and the Plymouth Brother thankfully withdrew. After that Winn allowed himself some margin and Lady Staines leaned back in her chair, ate grapes and enjoyed her coffee.

The conversation became pungent, savage and enlivened on Sir Peter’s part by strange oaths.

Winn kept to sudden thrusts of irony impossible to foresee and difficult to parry.

They drank velvety ripe old port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent development suited to James, who was in command of one of them.

As to aëroplanes he said that as we’d now succeeded in imitating infernal birds and fishes – he supposed we’d soon bring off reptiles the kind of creature the modern young would be likely to represent best.