'Oh! Serena, you want to get rid of me. I could never live this kind of life again. Lady Mary would kill me in another month; not an idea in common. Her daughter is fifty times more endurable, for she is innocent in her silliness. And then that cranky, exigeant colonel, longing to make love to me if I would let him; the stiff dinner parties, tiresome people, spoilt children—though I do delight in Harold and Winnie and Gwynne and Dot and baby, too, for that much—and—'
'And your father,' quietly suggested Mrs Jones.
'I never thought you would wish me to leave you, Serena. Those happy, useful days! The poor, the schools, the church!'
'They are everywhere, my love.'
'But so different. I never felt so happy or useful before I lived with you in London.'
'The change is in yourself, not in the place.'
'Oh! Serena, this is cruel! I could live with my father anywhere, but the others—impossible.'
'Think it over. You know that you have a home with us whenever you like; that it would be my pleasure as well as interest to have you always. That we shall miss you in every possible way; still duty is duty. As long as your father did not care, and Lady Mary was rather glad to have the Park to herself, the thing was, perhaps, different, at any rate Freda was not then the Freda she is now.
'Serena, you are a bitter-sweet, and a horrible little apple that is.'
'But they say it makes good cider.'