I hadn’t long to wait for my few words from the Governor.
He began—rather to my surprise—without his traditional “Now, Miss Trant,” but grimly and stiffly as I don’t suppose Mrs. Waters knows he can speak.
“Now! There is something I wanted to say to you. I am sorry to trouble you, but I am afraid that I have to ask you to be a little more careful in your manner to me.”
Which of the two manners was he going to fix upon? The one I reserved for him alone, or the pretty one that I used to him before his people?
“My manner? Oh!” I turned a dismayed face, the face of a typist caught out in some careless mistake, up to his as we walked along. “I am afraid I don’t quite know what you mean.”
“You do,” said his face.
But he only said concisely: “I mean the tone you sometimes feel called upon to adopt towards me, as just now, at breakfast. Of course when we are alone you must please yourself entirely. But that will hardly do before others.”
Ah, it was for Manner A, then, that he’d settled to take me to task. So none of it had been lost upon him, then; none of the unearthly sweetness hiding home-thrusts that only he was able to recognize as such! None of the elaborate ways in which I’ve been pretending to think of little things to please him; quoting (in public) bits of his songs that I call my favourites, picking a sulphur-coloured pansy—that he daren’t not wear!—for his button-hole, then making him take it out to let me change it for a leaf of scented geranium, because there were table decorations of those at the Savoy “the day we lunched there before you chose my ring; do you remember?” I hope he’ll never cease to remember and to regret “that day!”
For the whole nature of the grudge I have against him has changed in these few days. The thoughts have gone into the background of all that office drudgery and Near Oriental unpleasantness. I’ve forgotten that I used to hate him as part of a life of being ordered about on a few shillings a week. But when, in accepting this invitation to a house of luxury and leisure, I had the feeling of “coming home” to my old sort of life, I hadn’t realized how many of the feelings belonging to that by-gone life were going to wake up again inside me, indignantly ashamed. I was my father’s daughter. I was well accustomed to the ease and space and comforts of such a house as The Lawn—the Waters don’t suspect that, but I was born to them. I wasn’t born, however, to taking up the position in such a house which he has forced upon me. Dully simmering in my mind, for some time now, has been the thought of this slight which he has put upon me, this insult.