"Oh, no," said Lydia gravely. "You're not that."
She did not understand him, but she was, in her beautiful confidence, sure he was right. She was hurt. There was the wound in her heart, and that new sensation of its actually bleeding; but she had a fine courge of her own, and she knew grief over that inexplicable pang must be put away until the sight of it could not trouble him.
"I'm going to ask you a question," said Jeffrey shortly, in his distaste for asking it at all. "Do you want me to take father away with me, you and Anne?"
"Are you going away?" she asked, in an irrepressible tremor.
"Answer me," said Jeffrey.
She was not merely the beautiful child he had thought her. There was something dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from disillusion.
"If I took him away with me—and of course it would be made possible," he was blundering over this in decency—"possible for you to live in comfort—wouldn't you and Anne like to have some life of your own? You haven't had any. Like other girls, I mean."
She threw her own question back to him with a cool and clear decision he hadn't known the soft, childish creature had it in her to frame.
"Does he want us to go?"
"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey, faced, in the instant, by the hideous image of ingratitude she conjured up, his own as well as his father's.