“He asked me for my permission also.”
She exclaimed: “How very odd of him!”
“Why so?” asked the son and heir. “Why shouldn’t my permission be asked?”
“What do you know about Lucy or girls or anything? What ever did you say?”
“I said to Cecil, ‘Take her or leave her; it’s no business of mine!’ ”
“What a helpful answer!” But her own answer, though more normal in its wording, had been to the same effect.
“The bother is this,” began Freddy.
Then he took up his work again, too shy to say what the bother was. Mrs. Honeychurch went back to the window.
“Freddy, you must come. There they still are!”
“I don’t see you ought to go peeping like that.”
“Peeping like that! Can’t I look out of my own window?”
But she returned to the writing-table, observing, as she passed her son, “Still page 322?” Freddy snorted, and turned over two leaves. For a brief space they were silent. Close by, beyond the curtains, the gentle murmur of a long conversation had never ceased.
“The bother is this: I have put my foot in it with Cecil most awfully.” He gave a nervous gulp. “Not content with ‘permission,’ which I did give—that is to say, I said, ‘I don’t mind’—well, not content with that, he wanted to know whether I wasn’t off my head with joy. He practically put it like this: Wasn’t it a splendid thing for Lucy and for Windy Corner