"You know, Katharine," she said, "if you are so down on these young people, I shall one day--I really shall, I shall tell them how you nearly ran away with James Shrimpton."
"My dear," said Aunt Katharine. She was quite shocked. "I was a young unformed thing and father so overbearing----" She was so hurt she could go no further.
"Exactly," said Mrs. Leighton. "And my girls are young unformed things, and their father is not overbearing."
Aunt Katharine grunted.
"Ah well, you keep their confidence. That's true. I don't know a more united family. But this marriage of Isobel's does not say much for your management."
That was it--"management." Mrs. Leighton groaned slightly to herself. She never would be a manager, she felt sure. She offered a passive front to fate, and her influence stopped there. As for manoeuvring fate by holding the reins a trifle and pressing backward or forward, she had not the inclination at any time to interfere in such a way at all. She leaned on what Emerson had said about things "gravitating." She believed that things gravitated in the right direction, so long as one endeavoured to remain pure and noble, in the wrong one so long as one was overbearing and selfish. She had absolutely no fear as to how things would gravitate for Mabel after that night when she talked about Robin and went off to succour Jean.
She placidly returned to her crochet, and to the complainings of Aunt Katharine.
Cuthbert came down that evening, and Isobel, Elma, Betty and he went off to be grown-ups at a children's party at the Turbervilles. The party progressed into rather a "larky" dance, where there were as many grown-ups as children. All the first friends of the Leightons were there, including, of course, the Merediths. Cuthbert took in Isobel in rather a frigid manner. He endeavoured not to consider Meredith a cad, but his feelings in that direction were overweighted for the evening. He danced with the children, and "was no use for anybody else," as May Turberville put it. But then Cuthbert was so "ghastly clever and all that sort of thing," that he could not be put on the level of other people at all.
Cuthbert had got his summer lectureship. He told Elma, and then Mr. and Mrs. Leighton, and then Betty, and Isobel could not imagine what spark of mischief had lit their spirits to the point of revelry as they ambled along in their slow four-wheeler. Elma had only one despair in her mind. Neither Miss Grace nor Miss Annie were well. Miss Annie particularly seemed out of gear, so much so and so definitely, that for the first time for nearly thirty years Miss Grace spoke of having in Dr. Merryweather.
Cuthbert asked lots of questions.