"I shall be all alone up there!" said Miss Gailey, as cheerfully as she could.
"I'll go up with you and see you into the place. I should have to come back the same night--I'm so tremendously busy just now--what with the paper and so on."
"Yes, but--I quite admit all you say, George--but--"
"Here's another idea," he broke out. "Why don't you ask Mrs. Lessways to go up with you and stay a week or two? It would be a rare change for her, and company for you."
Miss Gailey looked quickly at her old friend.
"Oh! Bless you!" said Mrs. Lessways. "I've only been to London once, and that was only for two days--before Hilda was born. I should be no use in London, at my time of life. I'm one of your home-stayers." Nevertheless it was plain that the notion appealed to her fancy, and that she would enjoy flirting with it.
"Nonsense, Mrs. Lessways!" said George Cannon. "It would do you a world of good, and it would make all the difference to Sally."
"That it would!" Sarah agreed, still questioning Caroline with her watery, appealing eyes. In Caroline, Sarah saw her salvation, and snatched at it. Caroline could do nothing well; she had no excellence; all that Caroline could do Sarah could do better. And yet Caroline, by the mysterious virtue of her dry and yet genial shrewdness, and of the unstable but reliable equilibrium of her temperament, was the skilled Sarah's superior. They both knew it and felt it. The lofty Hilda admitted it. Caroline herself negligently admitted it by a peculiar, brusque, unaffected geniality of condescension towards Sarah.
"Do go, mother!" said Hilda. To herself she had been saying: "Another of his wonderful ideas!" The prospect of being alone in the house with Florrie, of being free for a space to live her own life untrammelled and throw all her ardour into her work, was inexpressibly attractive to Hilda. It promised the most delicious experience that she had ever had.
"Yes," retorted Mrs. Lessways. "And leave you here by yourself! A nice thing!"