Chapter 3

The retreating chain of carriages shut itself up like a telescope, and
the station began to resume its sleepy calm. Mrs. Baines's emotion now
could no longer be restrained from expression. She tottered towards the
waiting-room and sinking heavily on to a hard wooden seat she choked and
hiccupped and sobbed, and the tears rolled regularly, one after the
other, down her cavernous cheeks. Lucy took her trembling hands and
tried to soothe her; and then, Mrs. Baines, softened by this sympathy,
lost all that remained of her self-control and abandoned herself limply
on Lucy's shoulder.

"Oh!" she gasped, "I've parted with him in anger--he's gone! ... Perhaps
I shall never see him again.... My boy.... My only son. I never said a
kind word to him before he left. I thought there would be time.... I
thought John would come and make it up. I was cross because he went out
walking with you and came back late by train yesterday. You know I
always taught him to observe the Sabbath. But I'd forgive him
_anything_ if he'd only come back and give me _one_ kiss ... my boy...."

But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all
his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he
was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as
usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him
in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from
childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.

Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened
her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way
back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively
behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as
he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His
wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony
grief.

Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving
thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a
substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and
school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her
girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John
with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at
night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's
departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next
morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually
hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy
hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she
had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness--poor John was doubtless
now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced
herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.

Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her
surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom
felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.

*CHAPTER III*

*SIBYL AT SILCHESTER*

They had ridden over from opposite directions--he from Farleigh Wallop
on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet
Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern
Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of
early Christian Britain was then--and now--only marked by two-thirds of
an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees.
There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few
houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient
hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear,
apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous
past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest--waving fields
of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent
farmstead--unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster
school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and
its churchyard.

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the
untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves.
This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an
explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman.
He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her
appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode
behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted
away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a
Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the
riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too
obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or
twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure,
good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young
woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently
moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a
gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns
of the younger generation were distant cousins.

_Roger_ (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and
scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five
years ago--a little filled out perhaps.... And _this_ is how we meet.
How _utterly_ different from what I had been looking forward to! I
remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh _how_ you cried, and how for
the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say
_I_ didn't write--when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a
nigger to get a position to afford to marry--and _now_ I hear from Maud
you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come
as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper
that some one posted to me at Aden--I suppose it was _you_! And this is
what women call _fidelity_!"

_Sibyl_ (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks
Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss
my case--not mere romantic school girls--they would say I had acted with
ordinary common sense, and _very_ unselfishly. I am, as you know,
twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several
years--I should never again get such a chance ... and I really _do_ like
Lord Silchester, you don't know _how_ kind he can be--and you can't
_really_ care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and
never even _wrote_ to me...."

_Roger_: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the _World_
... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides,
I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office
... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with
scorn: "_Missionary_ meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing
fit to wear when I landed...."

_Sibyl_: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so
madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a
sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ...
or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you
as a shock, so I _did_ post that _World_ to you and got Gerry to address
it--and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But _do_ let's be
calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I _must_
get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming--she helped to bring
it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "_Damn_ her!") "She's got
twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I _am_ sorry ... in
a way ... but you'll find _heaps_ of girls, _much_ nicer than I am,
ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes
glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed
cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.)
"And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now
I know more about things--I was so young when you went away--I don't
approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their--I mean aren't their ...
children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something
unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which
she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the
audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)

_Roger_: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all
right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only
second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You
thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer,
and so you threw me over...."

_Sibyl_: "Well! I _did_ think I might, and _not_ selfishly. There's
papa--more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's
mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara
and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into
professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of
self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what
would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be
able to marry for _ever_ so long...."

(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")

_Sibyl_: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to
give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a
year, _if_ you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and
I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I
should have to come home. I _don't_ like roughing it, I should
_dislike_ hot countries; and I _hate_ black people.... No, Roger ...
dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in
Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several
years to come; and then ... I'll--I'll find some really _nice_ girl to
marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you
enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government--aren't
you glad that _horrid_ old Gladstone's _gone_?--He'll be at the Colonial
Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him,
once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall
get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But
Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though
all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages
that might accrue from Sibyl's _mariage de convenance_. He'd be
_hanged_ if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled
to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he
had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be
to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with
Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He
would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south,
find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in
no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham----

"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my
time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a
grass widow at home...."

Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with
an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain
boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him,
still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was
good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the
remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his
slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He
rode--yes--they had already had decorous rides together, but she
imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out
of him by the groom....

Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the
idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty--at any rate close on
fifty-six--and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though
really she wouldn't mind if _she_ died first, men were so perfectly
hateful, and so was your family--if you were a woman. You were expected
to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by
others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere
girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a
possibility--just a possibility--for weren't we all mortal?--that she
might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then
would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd
have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet
again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to _love_, she wouldn't
deny she had never felt _quite_ the same towards any one as she had
towards Roger....

But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were
positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then
leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to
mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to
Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer
road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.

He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob--borrowed for the
day--a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts
of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the
woods--to find afterwards she did not want it--before farmers had
changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-a-bancs,
motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats
and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and
paper-strewn.

Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years
since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this
country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never
before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was
England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the
green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering--grey on
green--in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in
bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue
campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with
swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a
scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep--neat
and tidy after shearing--the cock pheasants running across the
sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing
woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off
the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim
geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an
invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading
to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and
nose took in--such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an
unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or
the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted
round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling--it was irrational to
call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old
churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so
prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the
signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing
to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his
round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty
labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All
this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There
was not, in 1886.)

And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years!
As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but
_how_ artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have
cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of
India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only
turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to
be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done
in India without powerful backing....

Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord
Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to
permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular
commission in East Africa. Why not gradually--gradually of course--it
wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly--become reconciled to Sibyl's
marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African
career?...

So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham who cantered up the road
to the vicarage at Farleigh Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and
sat with his sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English tea.
Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty, the only sister of three
stalwart brothers, one a soldier, another a sailor and the third
intending to be a barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded
archaeologist; could not be called pretty, because she was too much like
a young man of twenty-five with almost a young man's flat figure, but
she was in every way satisfactory as a sister. Her father was out on
some archaeological ramble and she was glad of it because she thought
Roger might have come to her with a heart to mend. No doubt he felt
heart-broken over Sibyl's defection. She looked at him inquiringly
while she poured out tea, but would not of course broach the subject.

"You've been out a long time with the cob. I hope you haven't
over-ridden him? Where did you go?"

"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at Tadley and gave him an
hour's rest in Basingstoke; and another hour at Silchester. I've jogged
along very quietly, looking up old haunts--and--and I've seen Sibyl
Grayburn. She told me all about her engagement."

"Sibyl? Then--you don't mind so much? I hardly knew how to break it to
you...."

"_Mind_? Oh, well, there _was_ a boy-and-girl engagement, a flirtation
between us before I went away, as you knew. But Africa drove all that
out of my mind. Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year? I dare
say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's getting on. Girls can't
afford to wait and look about them like a man can. By the bye, old
girl, why doesn't some one come along and marry _you_? I don't know a
better sort of wife than _you'd_ make...."

_Maud_: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it. But I don't suppose I
shall ever marry. My line is to look after father for the rest of his
life, and then become everybody's aunt. I'm really his curate, you
know. And his clerk and his congregation, very often. Oh, I'm quite
happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have nicer brothers ... or perhaps a
nicer life. I love Farleigh----"

_Roger_ (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh that accompanied
this renunciation of marriage): "Jove! How jolly all this is: you're
right. If I wasn't a man I should think like you. What could one have
better than this?" And he looked away from the arbour and the prettily
furnished tea-table to the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the
herbaceous border. Beyond that the wooded slopes of Farleigh Down and
the distant meadows of the lowland, and then the sun-gilt roofs of
Basingstoke's northern suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five
miles away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating a busy
world beyond the quietude of the vicarage garden. He could see the
slight trace of a straight Roman road athwart the northern landscape,
Winchester to Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton and the
far-off woods of Sherborne. When he was queer with sun-fever in
Somaliland he would sometimes be tantalized by this view, like a mirage,
instead of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low ridges of
table-topped mountains and dotted with scrubby acacias, whitened by the
drought ... and would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle
and wonder if he would ever see home again. And here he was.... Hang
Sibyl!...

So when Sibyl Grayburn married Lord Silchester at the end of that
July--because he was fifty-six and impatient to have some summer for his
honeymoon before returning to take up the burden--a well-padded one--of
office in the Conservative Government--Captain Roger Brentham was among
the guests, the relations of the bride. And his best leopard skin,
suitably mounted, was in Sibyl's boudoir at Englefield awaiting Lady
Silchester's return from the Tyrol.

* * * * *

And in the winter of 1886, Captain Brentham received from Lord Wiltshire
the offer of a Consulate on the Last Coast of Africa and accepted it.
It was provisionally styled the Consulate for the Mainland of Zangia
where the Germans were already beginning to take up the administration,
but Brentham was instructed to reside at first at Unguja, the island
immediately opposite the temporary German capital. The British
Consul-General for the whole of Zangia had been recalled because of
heated relations with Germany. Pending his return Captain Brentham was
to act as Consul-General without, however, taking too much on himself,
as Mr. Bennet Molyneux of the African Department rather acidly told him.

Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all pleased at Brentham's
appointment: one of those things that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do
without consulting the permanent officials. Molyneux had not long been
in the new African Department (hitherto disparagingly connected with the
Slave Trade section); and as Africa had barely entered world-politics,
British Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent as to
how the necessary appointments were filled up, adopting generally names
suggested by Molyneux, so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor
relations--he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and cousins--or the
friends of his friends--such as Spencer Bazzard (q.v., as they say in
Encyclopaedias). If they were "rotters," the climate generally killed
them off in a few months; if they made good, they established in time a
claim on the Foreign Office regard and got transferred to Consular posts
in South America, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.

But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or uninformed, as he sometimes
appeared to be. So his Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's
querulous Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for such a
responsible East African post by reminding him that the gentleman in
question was well versed in Arabic through having accompanied a
Political Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden and
Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the Snow Mountains of East
Africa for the Intelligence Division, had contributed papers to the
Royal Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the Zoological
Society, and was personally vouched for by a colleague of Lord
Wiltshire's: all of which information for the African Department was
summed up by the Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See
here, Molly; take this and look pleasant. You can't have all the
African appointments in your gift. You must leave a few to the Old Man.
He generally knows what he's about." So Molyneux asked Brentham to dine
with him and apparently made the best of a bad job ... as he said with a
grin to his colleague, Sir Mulberry Hawk.

*CHAPTER IV*

*LUCY HESITATES*

When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent her vacation quietly at
Aldermaston working at her African outfit--material and mental--in a
desultory way. She supposed she would have to leave in the following
April to join her betrothed. April seemed a long while ahead. She had
not even given notice to the school managers yet of her intention to
give up teaching. It would not be necessary to do so or to brace her
mind for the agony of separation from her home until John had announced
that all was in readiness and she had received the formal intimation of
his Missionary Society that they approved of her going out to join him
and would make the necessary arrangements for a steamer passage.

Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of reading such books about
African exploration or mission life in Africa as she could obtain from
the Reading libraries. They served to strengthen her determination to
keep faith with John; while other ties and loves were pulling the other
way. She had in her veins that imaginational longing to see strange
lands and travel which is such an English trait; yet this longing
alternated with fits of absolute horror at her foolishness in having
consented to such an engagement. Why could she not have recognized when
she was well off? Could any one in her station of life have a more
delightful home?

The farmstead stood on a slope about a hundred feet above the Kennet
Valley. The river was a mile away, though little subsidiary brooks and
channels permeated the meadows in between, and in spring, summer and
autumn produced miracles of loveliness in flower shows: purple
loosestrife, magenta-coloured willow herb, mauve-tinted valerian,
cream-coloured meadow-sweet, yellow flags, golden king-cups, yellow and
white water-lilies, water-crowsfoot and flowering rush. Lucy was an
unexpressed, undeveloped artist, with an exceptional appreciation (for a
country girl) of the beauty in colour and form of flowers and herbage of
the velvety, blue-green, black-green cedars which rose above the wall of
the Park and overshadowed the churchyard, of the superb elms, oaks,
horse-chestnuts, ashes and hawthorns studding the grassy slopes between
the house and the water meadows. She loved the rich crimson colour of
the high old brick walls of the Park and the same tint in the farm
buildings, varied with scarlet and orange and the lemon and grey of
lichen and weather-stain. The old farm-house in which she had been born
and had passed all her twenty-four years of placid life, save when she
was at boarding-school, seemed to her just perfect in its picturesque
ancientry and its stored smells of preserved good things to eat and
drink. Their garden was carelessly ordered, but from March to October
had a wealth of flowers, the spicy odours of box borders, the pungent
scent of briar and honeysuckle.

She did take much interest in the details of farming--a trifle of
self-conceit made her think herself superior in her bookishness and
feeble water-colour painting to her younger sisters, who were already
experts in poultry-tending, butter-making, and bread-baking. But she
accepted as a matter of course the delicious results (as we should think
them now) of living at a well-furnished, well-managed farm: the milk and
cream, the fresh butter and new-laid eggs, the home-cured bacon, the
occasional roast duck and chicken; the smell of the new-mown hay, the
sight of ripe wheat or wheat neatly grouped in its golden sheaves in
chessboard pattern; the September charms of the glinting stubble with
its whirring coveys of partridges, its revived flower shows--scarlet and
blue, bright yellow, dead white, lavender, russet, and mauve; the
walnuts in the autumn from their own trees; the Spanish chestnuts from
the Park; impromptu Christmas dances in the big barn; an occasional
visit to a theatre or a magic-lantern-illustrated lecture in Reading.
On one such occasion she saw for the first time Captain Roger Brentham,
the explorer, who whilst staying with Lord and Lady Silchester gave a
lecture on his recent travels and some wonderful snow mountain he had
visited in East Africa.... Why should she seek to leave such
surroundings? She could read and hear about all that was most
interesting in the world without leaving her parents and her home. Yet,
to disappoint poor John, who counted on her coming out to share his
work--and if she threw him over she might never get another offer of
marriage and grow stout and florid like Bessie Rayner, ten years older
than she was, up at the Grange farm....

But _was_ marriage after all, with its children and illnesses and house
drudgery, so _very_ attractive to a dreamer? Might she not be happier
if she passed all the rest of her life at Aldermaston, saving up her
salary as a school-mistress against old age and a possible leaving of
the farm if--ever so far ahead--dear father died? She had often
thought, with a little encouragement she might _write_ ... write
stories! ... and she thrilled at the idea. But then, what experience
had she of the world--the great world beyond southern Berkshire--which
she could set down on paper?

So far, no one had proposed to her--even John had hardly asked her
definitely to marry him. He had always taken it for granted, since he
was eighteen, that she would, and from that age herself she had tacitly
accepted the position of his fiancee. Why had she acquiesced? There
was a weakness of fibre about her and John's stronger will had impressed
itself on her smiling compliance. Her mother had rather pursed her lips
at the alliance, having her doubts as to John being good enough, and
John's mother being even bearable as a mother-in-law.