After luncheon George offered to take Janet round the gardens. Janet looked timidly at Mrs Trefusis. She did not know whether she ought to accept or not. There might be etiquettes connected with afternoon walks of which she was not aware. For even since her arrival at Easthope yesterday it had been borne in upon her that there were many things of which she was not aware. "Pray let my son show you the gardens," said Mrs Trefusis, with impatient formality. "The roses are in great beauty just now." Janet went to put on her hat, and Mrs Trefusis lay down on the sofa in the drawing-room with a little groan. Anne sat down by her. The eyes of both women followed Janet's tall, magnificent figure as she joined George on the terrace. "She dresses like a shop-girl," said Mrs Trefusis. "And what a hat! Exactly what one sees on the top of omnibuses." Anne did not defend the hat. It was beyond defence. She supposed, with a tinge of compassion, what was indeed the case, that Janet had made a special pilgrimage to Mudbury to acquire it, in order the better to meet the eyes of her future mother-in-law. All Anne said was, "Very respectable people go on the top of omnibuses nowadays." "I am not saying anything against her respectability," said poor Mrs Trefusis. "Heaven knows if there had been anything against it I should have said so before now. It would have been my duty." Anne smiled faintly. "A painful duty." "I'm not so sure," said Mrs Trefusis grimly. She never posed before Anne, nor, for that matter, did any one else. "But from all I can make out this girl is a model of middle-class respectability. Yet she comes of a bad stock. One can't tell how she will turn out. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh." "There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth married his daughter's maid last week." "I don't know what I've done," said Mrs Trefusis, "that my only son should marry a pretty horse-breaker." "I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker." "So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first met her." "She rides magnificently. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and asked who she was." "Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of drugging some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was disgraceful. He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall have to know him now. The place will be overrun with her relations, whom I have avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me." This was a favourite expression of Mrs Trefusis'. She invariably spoke as if a curse had hung over her since her birth. "What does it matter who one knows?" said Anne.