My Son's Wife

(1913)

He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth,
and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few
friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation
of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded
Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with
brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on
the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other
people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries,
tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole
trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke.
Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he
and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn,
and the New Order.

His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than
abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the
day's end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him
early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity
of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left
contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large
independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell
Midmore's lot was far from contemptible.

At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely
separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that
Midmore's mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him
possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which
denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but
Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social
Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two,
after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and
was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with
a long nose, who called him 'Master Frankie'; and there he was
congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute,
who turned out to be his aunt's lawyer. He wrote his mother next day,
after a bright account of the funeral:

'So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five
hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here.
The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums
to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except "huntin',"
insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in
alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with
occasional peasants