“Thank you, my boy!” and he saw tears in her eyes, the first time he was conscious of having brought them. As he bent down to kiss her, she rallied, and cheerfully said, “I have no doubt it will all come right—Rosamond is too nice not to feel it at once.”
No such thing; Rosamond was still furious. If he disapproved, she would submit to him; but he had seen nothing wrong, had he?
“My dear Rose, I told you I was no judge: you forget what my eyes are; and my mother—”
“You have been to your mother?”
“My dear, what could I do?”
“And you think I am going to insult my own mother and sisters to please any woman’s finical prudish notions’? Pray what did Mrs. Poynsett say?”
The excuse of custom, pleaded by Mrs. Poynsett, only made Rosamond fiercer. She wished she had never come where she was to hear that her own mother was no judge of propriety, and her husband could not trust her, but must needs run about asking everybody if she were fit to be seen. Such a tempest Julius had never seen outside a back street in the garrison town. There seemed to be nothing she would not say, and his attempts at soothing only added to her violence. Indeed, there was only one thing which would have satisfied her, and that was, that she had been perfectly right, and the whole world barbarously wrong; and she was wild with passion at perceiving that he had a confidence in his own mother which he could not feel in hers.
Nor would he insist that Raymond should force Cecil to apologize. “My dear,” he said, “don’t you know there are things easier to ask than to obtain?”
To which Rosamond replied, in another gust, that she would never again sit down to table with Cecil until she had apologized for the insult, not to herself, she did not care about that, but to the mother who had seen her dresses tried on: Julius must tell Raymond so, or take her away to any cottage at once. She would not stay where people blamed mamma and poisoned his mind against her! She believed he cared for them more than for her!
Julius had sympathized far longer with her offended feeling than another could have done; but he was driven to assert himself. “Nonsense, Rose, you know better,” he said, in a voice of displeasure; but she pouted forth, “I don’t know it. You believe every one against me, and you won’t take my part against that nasty little spiteful prig!”