Lady Merrifield was a good deal diverted with Gillian’s report, and invited the two sisters to luncheon on the plea of their slight acquaintance with Anne—otherwise Mrs. Daventry—with a hint in the note not to compliment Mrs. Merrifield on Elizabeth’s production.
Then Dolores had to be prepared to receive any advance from Constance. She looked disgusted at first, and then, when she heard that Gillian had spoken her mind, said, ‘I can’t think why you should care.’
‘Of course I care, to have Constance behaving so ill to one of us.’
‘Do you think me one of you, Gillian?’
‘Who, what else are you?’
And Dolores held up her face for a kiss, a heartier one than had ever passed between the cousins. There was no kiss between the quondam friends, but they shook hands with perfect civility, and no stranger would have guessed their former or their present terms from their manner. In fact, Constance was perfectly absorbed in the contemplation of the successful authoress, the object of her envy and veneration, and only wanted to forget all the unpleasantness connected with the dark head on the opposite side of the table.
‘Oh Miss Merrifield,’ she asked, in an interval afterwards, when hats were being put on, ‘bow do you make them take your things?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bessie, smiling. ‘I take all the pains I can, and try to make them useful.’
‘Useful, but that’s so dull—and the critics always laugh at things with a purpose.’
‘But I don’t think that is a reason for not trying to do good, even in this very small and uncertain way. Indeed,’ she added, earnestly. ‘I have no right to speak, for I have made great mistakes; but I wanted to tell you that the one thing I did get published, which was not written conscientiously—as I may say—but only to work out a silly, sentimental fancy, has brought me pain and punishment by the harm I know I did.’