Mrs. Desfrayne retreated several steps, as if confounded.
“You are jesting!” she angrily exclaimed, unable to credit that she had heard aright.
“I presume you have seen the young lady?”
“Miss Turquand!” Mrs. Desfrayne slowly repeated—“Lois Turquand! Oh, it is impossible!”
The information did not seem to afford her much pleasure, and there was a visible expression of blank disappointment upon her face.
The truth—or part of the truth—was that Mrs. Desfrayne had no great liking for Lois Turquand. By nature aristocratic, proud as a duchess of Norman descent, she cared not for persons beneath her in station, while winning and all that was gracious to those in her own rank or above her.
To Lady Quaintree, wife of the world-famed lawyer, she had ever paid eager court; but Miss Turquand, the daughter of an embroideress, a penniless nobody, she had always politely ignored. When her son had told her of the strange will which had placed him in such an unexpectedly advantageous position, she had built, with feminine imaginative rapidity and skill, sparkling castles in the traitorous air. All her life she had yearned to mix freely in society—she longed to be a leader of fashion, a star in the hemisphere of the beau monde; but her income was limited. Her husband, a colonel in the army, had died almost a poor man, leaving her some six hundred a year, and to her son an equal pittance—for such she considered it, measured by her desires and wants. She was still young and most beautiful when left a widow, and might have married again advantageously, but her overweening ambition had induced her to reject more than one excellent offer, and now it was too late to retrieve these errors of judgment—though she still had her secret plans and schemes.
Under a fair and smiling mask she hid many little feminine piques and spites, and one of her pet “aversions” happened to be Miss Turquand. She could hardly pardon the girl her roseate youth, her fresh, piquant loveliness, her grace, spontaneous as that of a wood-nymph. For some reason, unexplainable even to herself, she always experienced a horribly galling sense of being old, and world-worn, and artificial, in presence of Lois Turquand, and it created a small vindictive sense of envy and spite that augured ill for any future attempt at conciliation. Her short-lived dream of taking the young person left in her son’s charge in hand, and shining in society by means of a reflected light, was at an end.
She could have better endured to hear that the legatee was a plain young woman, in a vastly inferior station. It was as if her son had held a draft of gall and wormwood to her lips, and asked her to swallow it.
“It is incredible!” she said, after a brief pause, during which she kept her eyes fixed upon her son’s face.