I went over to my mother and took the stool at her feet which my sister had just vacated.
"It's going to be: 'Yes,' mother; I have felt it all along."
"My dear, I won't be the one to keep you back. But need you make up your mind so soon?"
"Mrs. Grey says that the sooner I can leave the better. They would like me to start in a week or ten days," I answered, suppressing as best I could all signs of the feeling of desolation that came over me at the sound of my own words.
"You will have to get clothes," cried Rosalind; "those little mouse-coloured garments of yours will never do for ancestral palaces."
"Oh, with some new boots and an ulster—I'm afraid I must have an ulster—I shall be quite set up."
"You would pay very well for good dressing," observed Jenny, contemplating me with her air of impartial criticism. "You have a nice figure, and a pretty head, and you know how to walk."
"'Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley,'" replied Rosalind with some irony. "My dear Elsie, I have seen it in your eyes—they are highly respectable eyes, by the bye—I have seen it in your eyes from the first moment the letter came, that you meant to go. It is you quiet women who have all the courage, if you will excuse a truism."
"Well, yes, perhaps I did feel like going from the first."