Added to Lesley's new views of life, there was also a new feeling for her father. In the first rush of enthusiastic admiration for his book, she forgot all that she had heard against him, and believed—for the moment—that he was all Maurice Kenyon represented him to be. But naturally this state of mind could not last. The long years of her mother's influence told against any claim to love or respect on the father's part. Lesley remembered how bitterly Lady Alice spoke of him. She could not think that her mother had been wrong.
It is a terrible position for a son or daughter—to have to judge between father and mother. It is a wrong position, and one in which Lesley felt instinctively that she ought never to have been placed. Of course it was impossible for her to help it. Father and mother had virtually made her their judge. They said to her, "Live for a year with each of us, and choose which you prefer. You cannot have us both." And as the only true and natural position for a child is that in which he or she can have both, Lesley Brooke was in a very trying situation. She had begun life in her father's house as her mother's ardent partisan; and she was her mother's partisan still. Only she was not quite sure whether she was not going to find that she could love her father too. And in that case, Lesley was tremulously certain that Lady Alice would accuse her of unfaithfulness to her.
She turned with a sigh from the contemplation of her position to her new views of London and modern life. The poverty and ignorance of which she read had seemed hateful to her. But her impulse—always the impulse of generous souls—was not to shrink away from this newly-discovered misery, but to go down into the midst of it and help to cure the evil.
Still blindly ignorant of what was already done, or doing, she hardly knew in which way to begin a work that was so new to her. Indeed, she hardly estimated its difficulties. All the poor that she had ever seen were the blue-bloused peasants, or brown-faced crones, and quaint little maidens with pigtails, who had visited the convent at Fontainebleau. She was quite sure that English poor people were not like these. Her father knew a great deal about them, but she could not ask him. The very way in which he spoke to her—lightly always, and jestingly—made serious questioning impossible. To whom then should she apply? The answer presented itself almost immediately, and with extraordinary readiness—to Mr. Oliver Trent.
This decision was not so remarkable as it at first may seem. Lesley had run over in her mind a list of the persons whom she could not or would not ask. Her father and Miss Brooke?—impossible. Mrs. Romaine?—certainly not. Ethel?—Lesley did not believe that she knew anything about the poor. Maurice Kenyon?—not for worlds. The neighboring clergy?—Mr. Brooke had said that he did not want "the Blacks" about his house. The other men and women whom Lesley had seen were mere casual acquaintances; not friends of the family, like Oliver Trent.
At least, she supposed that Oliver was a friend of the family. He was Mrs. Romaine's brother; and Mrs. Romaine was a good deal at the house. In her own mind Lesley put him on the same footing as Mr. Kenyon—which estimate would have made Caspar Brooke exceedingly indignant, could he have known it. For though he did not exactly dislike Oliver Trent, he would never have thought of classing him with his friend, Maurice Kenyon.
But Oliver had already called twice on some pretext or other, since Lesley had come home: and on the latter of these occasions he had sat for a full hour with her in the drawing-room, talking chiefly of France and Italy—in low and softly modulated tones. Lesley was losing all her horror of interviews with young men. If the nuns had seen her now they would indeed have thought her lost to all sense of propriety. For one of Miss Brooke's chief theories was that no self-respecting young woman needs a chaperon. And she had flatly refused to chaperone Lesley except on inevitable or really desirable occasions. "The girl must learn to go about the world by herself," she had said. "And I will say this for Lesley, she is not naturally timid or helpless—it is only training that makes her so." And under this tuition Lesley soon acquired the self-possession in which she had been somewhat wanting when she came, newly-fledged, from her convent.
So when Oliver called again—it was on a message from his sister, and it had not yet recurred to Lesley to wonder at the readiness shown by English brothers to run on messages to their sisters' friends—he found Lesley alone, as usual, in the drawing-room, and she welcomed him with considerable warmth—a warmth that took him by surprise.
"I am so glad to see you, Mr. Trent: I wanted to ask you something," she said, at once.
"Ask me anything—command me in anything," he replied.