Everybody waited in eager delight for her next words. Such tit-bits of attention and laudation did not often fall to the district. It occurred to people that after all the local self-conceit might not be entirely unjustified.
"Ah!" Manna pouted. "But you have spots!"
"Spots!" repeated young Paul Swetnam, amid a general laugh.
She turned to him: "You said there were no spots on Knype Football Club, did you not? Well, there is a spot on you English. You are dreadfully exasperating to us Danes. Oh, I mean it! You are exasperating because you will not show your feelings!"
"Tom, that must be one for you," said Charlie Fearns.
"We're too proud," said Dr. Stirling.
"No," replied Manna maliciously. "It is not pride. You are afraid to show your feelings. It is because you are cowards--in that!"
"We aren't!" cried Hilda, inspired. And yielding to the temptation which had troubled her incessantly ever since she left the boudoir, she put her arms round Edwin and kissed him. "So there!"
"Loud applause!" said young George on the roll of carpet. He said it kindly, but with a certain superiority, perhaps due to the facts that he was wearing a man's "long trousers" for the first time that night, and that he regarded himself as already almost a Londoner. There was some handclapping.
Edwin's eyes had seduced Hilda. Looking at them surreptitiously she had suddenly recalled another of his tricks,--tricks of goodness. When she had told him one evening that Minnie was prematurely the mother of a girl, he had said: "Well, we'll put £130 in the savings bank for the kid." "£130? Whatever are you talking about?" "£130. I received it from America this very morning as ever is." And he showed her a draft on Brown, Shipley & Co. He said 'from America.' He was too delicate to say 'from George Cannon.' It had been a triumphant moment for him. And now, as before them all Hilda held him to her, the delicious thought that she had power over him, that she was shaping the large contours of his existence, made her feel solemn in her bliss. And yet simultaneously she was reflecting with a scarcely perceptible hardness: "It's each for himself in marriage after all, and I've got my own way." And then she noticed the whiteness of his shirt-front under her chin, and that reminded her of his mania for arranging his linen according to his own ideas in his own drawer, and the absurd tidiness of his linen; and she wanted to laugh.