“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.
“It perfectly well might.”
Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have been a child.
The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.
“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”
“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”
“Why not to him?”
“I know nothing about him.”
“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not even know his first name when you asked me!”
A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known, Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say. She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet commit herself to nothing?