A little later a real honest quarrel was reported. Letitia, habitually unpunctual, was three-quarters of an hour late for an appointment, and he simply had not waited for her. Under her anger Nan could catch her admiration for the first man who had dared not to wait.
"I explained to him that I could not help it, and all he said was: 'You could have helped it if I had been a train.' Of course, everything is over—he does not know how to behave."
No letter at all came in the next mail, and the announcement of her engagement in the one following:
"Fortunately—and wonderfully—mamma likes him, for, as you know, it would have been awfully hard to marry a man if she hated him."
It would indeed; or, rather, Nan thought, it would have been difficult for Letitia to fall in love with a man Mrs. Lewis did not approve of, for she had a wonderful gift of phrase—just, but cruel—by which budding sentiments could be cut off as by a knife. Nan had seen her more than once prune away a growing romance from Letitia's life with a deft, hideously descriptive sentence. Each time Nan had been in complete sympathy with her.
She usually did agree with Mrs. Lewis, who was the most brilliant woman she had ever known—and almost the most alarming. She saw life not only steadily and whole, and in the darkest colors, but she reported most frankly on what she saw. Frauds, or even people mildly artificial, dreaded Mrs. Lewis as they did the plague. Letitia herself would have dreaded her if she had not been her daughter. It said a great deal for Roger Rossiter's integrity that his future mother-in-law liked him. It also said something for his financial situation. Mrs. Lewis had always intended her child to marry someone with money.
"It is not exactly that I'm mercenary," she said. "I don't want Letitia to be specially magnificent; but I want her to have everything else, and money too. Why not?"
So when Nan heard the marriage had actually taken place, she felt pretty sure Roger must have enough to support Letty comfortably. It was really astonishing, she thought, how much she knew about him, this man she had never seen, more than she knew about lots of people she saw constantly. And so, as she rang the bell of his house, she had something of the same excitement that she might have had on seeing the curtain rise on a play about which she had heard endless discussion. At last she was going to be able to judge it for herself.
A Swedish maidservant came to the door—a nice-looking woman with an exaggerated opinion of her own knowledge of English. She almost refused Nan admittance—just to be on the safe side; but Letitia's cheerful shout intervened.