Then the conversation ran away into a description of what had been done during the day. He wished to make it understood that there was no permanent link binding him to Brook Park, but he hardly knew how to say it without going beyond the lines of ordinary conversation. At last there seemed to be an opening,—not exactly what he wished, but still an opening. “Brook Park is not exactly the place,” said he, “at which I should ever feel myself quite at home.” This was in answer to some chance word which had fallen from Mrs. Dugdale.
“I am sorry for that,” said Alice. She would have given a guinea to bring the word back after it had been spoken. But spoken words cannot be brought back.
“Why sorry?” he asked, smiling.
“Because—Oh, because it is so likely that you may be there often.”
“I don’t know that at all.”
“You have become so intimate with them!” said Alice. “We are told in Beetham that the party was got up all for your honour.”
So Sir Walter had told him, and so Maria, the naughty girl, had said also—“Only for your beaux yeux, Major Rossiter, we shouldn’t have had any party at all.” This had been said by Maria when she was laughing at him about her sister Georgiana. “I don’t know how that may be,” said the Major; “but all the same I shall never be at home at Brook Park.”
“Don’t you like the young ladies?” asked Mrs. Dugdale.
“Oh, yes; very much; and Lady Wanless; and Sir Walter. I like them all, in a way. But yet I shall never find myself at home at Brook Park.”
Alice was very angry with him. He ought not to have gone there at all. He must have known that he could not be there without paining her. She thoroughly believed that he was engaged to marry the girl of whose family he spoke in this way. He had thought,—so it seemed to her,—that he might lessen the blow to her by making little of the great folk among whom his future lot was to be cast. But what could be more mean? He was not the John Rossiter to whom she had given her heart. There had been no such man. She had been mistaken. “I am afraid you are one of those,” she said, “who, wherever they find themselves, at once begin to wish for something better.”