Like her son, Lady Gertrude clung blindly to the narrow outlook of a bygone period, and her ideas of matrimony were based strictly upon the English Marriage Service.
She had not realised that the Great War had created a different world from the one she had always known, and that women had earned their freedom as individuals by sharing the burden of the war side by side with men.

Nor had Roger infused any fresh ideas into her mind on his return from serving in the Army.

He had volunteered immediately war broke out, his sense of duty and loyalty to his country being as sturdy as his affection for every foot of her good brown earth he had inherited.

But he was not an impressionable man, and when peace finally permitted him to return to his ancestral acres, he settled down again quite happily into the old routine at Trenby Hall.
So it was hardly surprising that Lady Gertrude had remained unchanged, expecting and requiring that the world should still run smoothly on--without even a side-slip!--in the same familiar groove as that to which she had always been accustomed.

This being so, it was quite clear to her that Nan would require a considerable amount of tutelage before she was fit to be Roger's wife.