“Oh, the selfishness of these girls!” cried the deserted one. “I have got her a husband to her taste, so now she runs away from me to think of him.”
The next moment she looked at the enormity from another point of view, and then with this burst of injured virtue gave way to a steady complacency.
“She is caught at last. She notices his very voice. She fancies she cares for politics—ha! ha! She is gone to meditate on him—could not bear any other topic—would not even talk about dress, a thing her whole soul was wrapped up in till now. I have known her to go on for hours at a stretch about it.”
There are people with memories so constructed that what they said, and another did not contradict or even answer, seems to them, upon retrospect, to have been delivered by that other person, and received in dead silence by themselves.
Meantime Lucy was in her own room and the door bolted.
So she was the next day; and uneasy Mrs. Bazalgette came hunting her, and tapped at the door after first trying the handle, which in Lucy's creed was not a discreet and polished act.
“Nobody admitted here till three o'clock.”
“It is me, Lucy.”
“So I conclude,” said Lucy gayly. “'Me' must call again at three, whoever it is.”
“Not I,” said Aunt Bazalgette, and flounced off in a pet.