During the three days that I have now been staying at The Lawn, I have managed to “keep up” without difficulty two utterly distinct and different manners.
“Manner A.”—assumed for the benefit of the Governor’s family—the rather shy but charming and devoted young fiancée.
“Manner B.”—well, to be frank, a perfect little cat!
But to begin with the first manner.
I should be ashamed to act it as well as I do, if it weren’t that I must keep the whip-hand over the Governor, and that this is the only way, for his mother and sisters are really too sweet with me.
Never, during all the palmy days of the Trant family, have I had so many pretty and generous things said about me as I’ve heard in these three days from my employer’s unsuspecting mother.
She told me yesterday, “When Billy was ten I’d begun to wonder whether, somewhere, some other mother was watching a pink-lined cot that held something which was to become very precious, later on, to my little son. And—twenty-one, are you, dear?—it must have been so, then. How glad I am it was you! Ten years is such a nice difference in age, too; I was twenty-one——”
And her soft grey eyes looked at me as if they saw, through me, into the past.
Her young daughter Blanche, on the other hand, gazes at me as wistfully as though, through me, she could look into the future. I feel as if I were supposed to be standing beside a wall which only I am tall enough (for once!) to see over.