Nan surmised she was intended to gather that it would be her duty to make everything “so easy and comfortable” for him in the future!  She almost smiled.  Most of the married men she knew were kept busy seeing that everything was made easy and comfortable for their wives.

“Still,” continued Lady Gertrude, “there could be no objection to your making an occasional trip to London.”

She had a dry, decisive method of speech which gave one the impression she was well accustomed to laying down the law—­and that her laws were expected to remain unbroken.  The “occasional trip to London” sounded bleakly in Nan’s ears.  Still, she argued, Lady Gertrude would only be her mother-in-law—­and she was sure she could “manage” Roger.  There is a somewhat pathetic element in the way in which so many people light-heartedly enter into marriage, the man confident in his ability to “mould” his wife, the woman never doubting her power to “manage” him.  It all seems quite simple during the adaptable period of engagement, when romance spreads a veil of glamour over the two people concerned, effectually concealing for the time being the wide gulf of temperament that lies between them.  It is only after the knot has been tied that the unlooked-for difficulties of managing and moulding present themselves.

Nan found it increasingly difficult to sustain her side of the conversation with Lady Gertrude.  The latter’s old-fashioned views clashed violently with her own modern ones, and there seemed to be no mutual ground upon which they could meet.  Like her son, Lady Gertrude clung blindly to the narrow outlook of a bygone period, and her ideas of matrimony were based strictly upon the English Marriage Service.

She had not realised that the Great War had created a different world from the one she had always known, and that women had earned their freedom as individuals by sharing the burden of the war side by side with men.  Nor had Roger infused any fresh ideas into her mind on his return from serving in the Army.  He had volunteered immediately war broke out, his sense of duty and loyalty to his country being as sturdy as his affection for every foot of her good brown earth he had inherited.  But he was not an impressionable man, and when peace finally permitted him to return to his ancestral acres, he settled down again quite happily into the old routine at Trenby Hall.

So it was hardly surprising that Lady Gertrude had remained unchanged, expecting and requiring that the world should still run smoothly on—­without even a side-slip!—­in the same familiar groove as that to which she had always been accustomed.  This being so, it was quite clear to her that Nan would require a considerable amount of tutelage before she was fit to be Roger’s wife.  And she was equally prepared to give it.

In some inexplicable manner her attitude of mind conveyed itself to Nan, and the latter was rebelliously conscious of the older woman’s efforts to dominate her.  It came as an inexpressible relief when at last their tete-a-tete was interrupted.