Susie Bateman looked at the girl as she sat there, with hands clasped together and downcast eyes, striving to look the very picture of be-lectured demureness, and tried to feel angry with her. Yet, somehow, she could not—no, not even when she thought to detect a suspicious heave of the shoulders which denoted a powerful fund of compressed laughter. With the absent object of her intended “straight talk” she felt venomously savage. With this one—no, she could not.
“Well, what I want to say is this,” she went on. “Nidia, is it fair to encourage that man as you do?”
“Which man? There are so many men. Do I encourage them?”
“Oh, child, don’t be so wildly exasperating. You know perfectly well who I mean.”
Then Nidia lifted her eyes with a gleam of delightful mischief in them.
“I have a notion you are ungrammatical, Govvie. I am almost sure you ought to have said ‘whom I mean.’ Well, we won’t be particular about that. But, as my American adorer, ‘Major’ Shackleton, would say, ‘Oh, do drive on,’ By the way, is he the man I am encouraging?”
What was to be done with such a girl as this? But Susie Bateman was not to be put off.
“You know perfectly well that I mean John Ames.”
“Oh! Now you’re talking, as my ‘Major’ aforesaid would rejoin. And so I encourage John Ames, do I? Poor fellow! he seems to need it.”
There was an unconscious softness wherewith these words were uttered. It drove the other frantic, “Need it indeed! On the contrary, what he needs is discouragement, and plenty of it. Well, he gets it from me, at any rate.”