"Doesn't mother want to keep me? Does she want Bobby Trench for me?"
"No, I am quite sure she doesn't."
"Then what is it all about? Oh, I am very unhappy, Virginia. I want to talk it all over with Nancy; but I can't now. It is just as if everything were falling away from me. Nobody cares. A little time ago I should have gone to mother if I had hurt my finger. I feel all alone. Why does father want to bring Bobby Trench worrying me, of all the people in the world?"
"Dearest Joan, you are making too much of it. You talk as if you were going to be forced into something you don't like."
"That is just what I feel is happening. It isn't like Kencote; not like anything I have known. Oh, I wish I were a little girl again."
"My dear, put it like this; somebody is bound to want you, sooner or later. I suppose somebody wants you now. He moves mountains to get at you, and find out whether you want him. You don't, and that is all there is to say about it."
"It might be," said Joan, "if it weren't that father is one of the mountains. He is one that is very easily shifted. Oh, I'm not a child any longer. I do know something about the world. I do know quite well that if he were not who he is, father would not have him near the place. Money and rank—those are what he really cares about, though he pretends to despise them—in anybody else. What is the good of belonging to an old and proud family, as we do, if you can't be just a little prouder than the rest?"
"Well, my dear, as a product of a country where those things don't count for much, I am bound to say that I think it isn't much good. People are what their characters and surroundings make them."
"Father wouldn't say that. He would say that blood counted for a lot. I am quite sure he would say that people like us had a finer sense of honour than people who are nobodies by birth. I don't think he comes out of the test very well. I think if anything were to happen to him where his birth and his position wouldn't help him, his honour wouldn't be finer than anybody else's. If he were to lose all his money, for instance—I think he would feel that more than anything in the world. He would be stripped of almost everything. No-one would know him."
"Oh, Joan darling, you mustn't say things like that. It isn't like you."