“Have you seen young Scales?”
“Yes,” said Sophia with grimness, glancing audaciously for an instant at her mother. (“She can’t kill me: She can’t kill me,” her heart muttered. And she had youth and beauty in her favour, while her mother was only a fat middle-aged woman. “She can’t kill me,” said her heart, with the trembling, cruel insolence of the mirror-flattered child.)
“How came you to meet him?”
No answer.
“Sophia, you heard what I said!”
Still no answer. Sophia looked down at the table. (“She can’t kill me.”)
“If you are going to be sullen, I shall have to suppose the worst,” said Mrs. Baines.
Sophia kept her silence.
“Of course,” Mrs. Baines resumed, “if you choose to be wicked, neither your mother nor any one else can stop you. There are certain things I CAN do, and these I SHALL do ... Let me warn you that young Scales is a thoroughly bad lot. I know all about him. He has been living a wild life abroad, and if it hadn’t been that his uncle is a partner in Birkinshaws, they would never have taken him on again.” A pause. “I hope that one day you will be a happy wife, but you are much too young yet to be meeting young men, and nothing would ever induce me to let you have anything to do with this Scales. I won’t have it. In future you are not to go out alone. You understand me?”
Sophia kept silence.