The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes Page A

she did so, Gilbert had astonished her by being “difficult”: he had practically ticked her off for even suggesting he might let these people have a cottage! In the end she hadn’t dared confess to him she had virtually promised Mrs. Winter.
    Now, while Mary lay long in the hot water thinking about the Hermitage as a solution, Gilbert was already tying his evening tie and also thinking. His brisk game of squash with the doctor’s son ought to have left him enjoying unalloyed that virtuous feeling which is the chief reward of exercise when you are sedentary and thirty; but thoughts of the morning’s argument with Mary were troubling him.
    A most pathetic case ... yes, but a question of Principle was involved. Yet he doubted if Mary even in the end had hoisted in fully how right he had been to refuse—and the doubt pained him, for he loved Mary. The point was that these people were strangers. His first duty was to his own people, he had tried to show Mary; and cottages were scarce: at the moment even his own new carpenter was having to live in lodgings till a cottage fell vacant for him. But Mary had seemed unimpressed (her picture of the dying Gwilym refusing to be ousted from her mind). The bachelor carpenter was quite comfortable at the Tucketts, she had urged: couldn’t he wait?
    Couldn’t Mary see it would be morally wrong to give strangers a Mellton cottage over Mellton heads? If you don’t draw the line somewhere (Gilbert argued), you soon cease being able to do your duty by your own people, the people to whom it is owed . One’s duty to mankind at large isn’t in that same way a personal, man-to-man relationship: it’s a collective duty, and one’s services to Liberalism rather are its proper discharge—not random little drop-in-a-bucket acts of kindness. Surely no one supposed he ought to rush off to Turkey personally to rescue a massacred Armenian or two? But he’d certainly make time to address that Armenian Atrocities Protest Meeting next month; and similarly his correct Liberal response to these strangers’ plight was to campaign for improved National Insurance, more Houses for the Poor: not try to take these particular poor under his own personal wing ...
    As Gilbert stood there tying his tie the lean face which looked back at him from the glass ought to have been reassuring: with its firm jaw and permanently indignant gray eyes it was so palpably the face of a Man of Principle. But was Mary truly a woman of Principle? That was the trouble. Alas, Mary yielded all too easily to irrational instinct! There were times lately you almost sensed a distaste in her for all a-priori reasoning, however clearly it was put ...
    Gilbert loved Mary; but was he perhaps a little afraid of her always in any ethical context?
    Gilbert was silent and distrait at dinner that night—not on Nellie’s account however, or because of the Poor: no, it was something of vital importance. For as he left his dressing-room he had been called to the telephone and what he had heard was disturbing. The speaker knew someone very close to L.G. (with him now, on his American tour). It had been noised widely abroad that lately the Little Man seemed bent on concocting his own little economic ideas unaided, and from what this chap said might not be quite sound even about Free Trade any more! Then the cat was among the Liberal pigeons indeed.
    In short, Liberalism just then had problems on its plate more immediate than slaughtered Armenians and the Poor ... imprimis, there was the split in the party itself to heal—or to exploit; and Gilbert was involved in all that up to the neck.
    Thus at dinner Gilbert hardly understood Mary at first when she mentioned the Hermitage: his mind flew first to St. Petersburg, then to his wine-cellar.
    â€œNo—up on the downs! In the chase. As somewhere for Mrs. Winter’s sister.”
    That place—for her to live in?—Lumme ... but