abandoned the whole idea and told his manservant that he was going out and did not know when he would be back.
He took a hansom all the way to Primrose Hill, where his father lived, and arrived just as the shadows were lengthening and the sun was going down in a limpid sky.
Henry Rathbone was at the far end of the long lawn staring at the apple trees whose gnarled branches were thick with blossom buds. He was a taller man than his son, and leaner, a little stooped with constant study. Before his retirement he had been a mathematician and sometime inventor. Now he dabbled in all sorts of things for pleasure and to keep his mind occupied. He found life far too interesting to waste a day of it, and all manner of people engaged his attention. His own parents had been of humble stock; in fact, his maternal grandfather had been a blacksmith and wheelwright. He made no pretensions to superiority, except that when he judged a man to have sufficient intelligence to know better, he suffered fools with great impatience.
"Good evening, Father," Rathbone called as he stepped through the French doors across the paved terrace and onto the grass.
Henry turned with surprise.
"Hello, Oliver! Come down and look at this. Do you know the honeysuckle in this hedge flowered right on until Christmas, and it's coming well into leaf again already. And the orchard is full of primroses. How are you?" He regarded his son more closely. The evening light was very clear and perhaps more revealing than the harsher sun would have been. "What is wrong?"
Oliver reached him and stopped. He put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the hedge with the aforementioned honeysuckle twined through it, and the bare branches of the orchard beyond. His father frequently read him rather too easily.
"Difficult case," he answered. "Shouldn't really have taken it on in the first instance. Too late now."
Henry started to walk back towards the house. The sun was barely above the trees and any moment it would disappear. There was a golden haze in the air and it was appreciably colder than even a few minutes before. A cloud of starlings wheeled above a distant stand of poplars, still bare, although in the next garden a willow trailed weeping branches like streamers of pale chiffon. The breeze was so slight it did not even stir them.
Henry took a pipe out of his pocket but did not bother even to pretend to light it. He seemed to like just to hold it by the bowl, waving it to emphasize a point as he spoke.
"Well, are you going to tell me about it?" he asked. He gestured towards a clump of wood anemones. "Self-seeded," he observed. "Can't think how they got there. Really want them in the orchard. What sort of case?"
"Breach of promise," Oliver replied.
Henry looked at him sharply, his face full of surprise, but he made no comment.
Oliver explained anyway. "At first I refused. Then the same evening I went to a ball, and I was so aware of the matrons parading their daughters, vying with one another for any available unmarried man, I felt like a quarry before the pack myself. I could imagine how one might be cornered, unable to extricate oneself with any grace or dignity, or the poor girl either."
Henry merely nodded, putting the pipe stem in his mouth for a moment and closing his teeth on it.
"Too much is expected of marriage," Oliver went on as they came to the end of the grass and stepped across the terrace to the door. He held it open while Henry went inside, then followed him in and closed it.
"Draw the curtains, will you?" Henry requested, going over to the fire and taking away the guard, then placing several more coals on it and watching it flame up satisfactorily.
Oliver walked over towards the warmth and sat down, making himself comfortable. There was always something relaxing about this room, a familiarity, books and odd pieces of furniture he remembered all his life.
"I'm not decrying it, of course," he went on. "But one shouldn't expect someone else to fill all the expectations in our lives, answer all the loneliness or the dreams, provide us with a social status, a roof over our heads, daily bread, clothes for our backs, and a purpose for living as well, not to mention laughter and hope and love, someone to justify our aspirations and decide our moral judgments."