She told Molly, “I like your young man, dear; he has pleasant manners, and seems to appreciate me,” and asked him to come to the house as often as he could. Eddy did so. He came to lunch and dinner, and met pleasant, polite, well-dressed people. (You had to be rather well-dressed at the Crawfords’: they expected it, as so many others do, with what varying degrees of fulfilment!) It is, of course, as may before have been remarked in these pages, exceedingly important to dress well. Eddy knew this, having been well brought up, and did dress as well as accorded with his station and his duties. He quite saw the beauty of the idea, as of the other ideas presented to him. He also, however, saw the merits of the opposite idea held by some of his friends, that clothes are things not worth time, money, or trouble, and fashion an irrelevant absurdity. He always assented sincerely to Arnold when he delivered himself on this subject, and with equal sincerity to the tacit recognition of high standards that he met at the Crawfords’ and elsewhere. He also met at the Crawfords’ their nephew Nevill Bellairs, who was now parliamentary secretary to an eminent member, and more than ever admirable in his certainty about what was right and what wrong. The Crawfords too were certain about that. To hear Nevill on Why Women should Not Vote was to feel that he and Daphne must be for ever sundered, and, in fact, were best apart. Eddy came to that melancholy conclusion, though he divined that their mutual and unhappy love still flourished. “You’re unfashionable, Nevill,” his aunt admonished him. “You should try and not be that more than you can help.” Captain Crawford, a simple, engaging, and extraordinarily youthful sailor man of forty-six, said, “Don’t be brow-beaten, Nevill; I’m with you,” for that was the sort of man he was; and the young man from the Foreign Office said how a little while ago he had approved of a limited women’s suffrage, but since the militants, etc., etc., and everyone he knew was saying the same. “I am sure they are,” Mrs. Crawford murmured to Eddy. “What a pity it does not seem to him a sufficient reason for abstaining from the remark himself. I do so dislike the subject of the suffrage; it makes everyone so exceedingly banal and obvious. I never make any remarks about it myself, for I have a deep fear that if I did so they might not be more original than that.” “Mine certainly wouldn’t,” Eddy agreed. “Militant suffragism is like the weather, a safety-valve for all our worst commonplaces. Only it’s unlike the weather in being a little dull in itself, whereas the weather is an agitatingly interesting subject, as a rule inadequately handled.... You know, I’ve no objection to commonplace remarks myself, I rather like them. That’s why I make them so often, I suppose.” “I think you have no objection to any kind of remarks,” Mrs. Crawford commented. “You are fortunate.”