"Oh, Virginia, that's nonsense. He was quite rude to him when he came. Besides, it's a different thing altogether, asking him to come. He needn't have done that. Why did he do it?"
"Isn't Lord Sedbergh an old friend of his?"
"Virginia, I believe you are in the conspiracy against me. I hate Bobby Trench, and when he comes here I won't have a thing to say to him. If father wants him here, he can look after him himself. I couldn't believe it when it first came into my head; but father said something to me, after he had looked at me once or twice in an odd sort of way, almost as if I were a person he didn't know."
"What did he say to you?"
"Oh, something about him, I forget what now. And when I said what an idiot I thought he was, he was quite annoyed, and said I ought not to talk about people in that way. How can father be so changeable? He treats us as if nobody had any sense but himself, and lays down the law; and then, even in a question in which you agree with him, you find that all his sound and fury means nothing at all, and he has turned completely round."
"Well, my dear, we are not all the same. Your father speaks very strongly whatever is in his mind at the moment, and if he has cause to change his mind he is just as strong on the other side. It was so with me, you know well enough. He wouldn't hear a word in my favour; and now he likes me almost as much as Dick does. You have to dig down deeper than his speech to find what is fixed in him."
"I don't believe that anything is fixed. Anyone would have said that he had a real dislike to Brummels, and all that goes with it. I am sure he made fuss enough when I went there, and has gone on making it ever since; and Bobby Trench summed it all up for him. He wouldn't have this and he wouldn't have that; and Kencote, and the way we live here, was the only sort of life that anybody ought to live. Oh, you know it all by heart. And then, just as one is beginning to think there is something in it, and that we have been very happy living quietly here, one finds that he, of all people, wants something else."
"What does he want?"
"What does he want for me? Does he want Bobby Trench, Virginia? There! You don't say anything. You are in the conspiracy. I won't. Nothing will make me."
"My dear child, there is no conspiracy. And if there were, I shouldn't be in it. I don't want Bobby Trench for you; I want somebody much better. But I don't want anybody, yet awhile. I want to keep you."