Mrs. Braefield, in her frank outspoken way,—“I don’t take much to girls of Lily’s age in general, though I am passionately fond of children. You know how I do take to Lily; perhaps because she is so like a child. But she must be an anxious charge to you.”
Mrs. Cameron replied by an anxious “No; she is still a child, a very good one; why should I be anxious?”
Mrs. Braefield, impulsively,—“Why, your child must now be eighteen.”
Mrs. Cameron,—“Eighteen—is it possible! How time flies! though in a life so monotonous as mine, time does not seem to fly, it slips on like the lapse of water. Let me think,—eighteen? No, she is but seventeen,—seventeen last May.”
Mrs. Braefield,—“Seventeen! A very anxious age for a girl; an age in which dolls cease and lovers begin.”
Mrs. Cameron, not so languidly, but still quietly,—“Lily never cared much for dolls,—never much for lifeless pets; and as to lovers, she does not dream of them.”
Mrs. Braefield, briskly,—“There is no age after six in which girls do not dream of lovers. And here another question arises. When a girl so lovely as Lily is eighteen next birthday, may not a lover dream of her?”
Mrs. Cameron, with that wintry cold tranquillity of manner, which implies that in putting such questions an interrogator is taking a liberty,—“As no lover has appeared, I cannot trouble myself about his dreams.”
Said Elsie inly to herself, “This is the stupidest woman I ever met!” and aloud to Mrs. Cameron,—“Do you not think that your neighbour, Mr. Chillingly, is a very fine young man?”
“I suppose he would be generally considered so. He is very tall.”