"Margaret and Monica saw you sitting on Guy's knee. In any case I would rather you never did that. In any case ... yes ... but in a place where people passing might have seen ... yes, would have seen ... oh, it was inexcusable. I shall have to make much stricter rules...."
"Are you going to speak to Guy about this?" Pauline asked. The house seemed to be whirling away like a leaf, such a shattering of her love were these words of her mother.
"How can I speak to Guy about it?" Mrs. Grey demanded, irritably. "How can I, Pauline? It has nearly choked me to speak to you."
"I think Monica and Margaret are almost wicked!" Pauline cried in flames. "They are trying to destroy everything. They are, they are. No, Mother, you sha'n't defend them. I knew they felt guilty when they went out of the room like that. How dare they put horrible thoughts in your mind? How dare they? They're cruel to me. And you're cruel to me. I don't understand what's happening to everybody. You'll make me hate you all, if you speak like that!"
She rushed from the nursery and went first to the music-room, where Margaret was sounding deep notes, hanging over her violoncello, and where Monica was playing one of those contained, somewhat frigid accompaniments.
"Margaret and Monica," said Pauline, standing in the doorway, "you're never to dare to speak about me to Mother as you must have spoken this afternoon. Because neither of you has any emotion but conceit and selfishness, you shall not be jealous of Guy and me. Margaret, you can have no heart. I shall write to Richard and tell him you're heartless. Don't smile down at your violoncello. You shall not rule me into being like yourself. Oh, I'll never play music with either of you again!"
Then she left them, and in her white room for an hour she listened hopelessly to the trolling wind.
NOVEMBER
Guy was very indignant when he heard from Pauline the sequel of her sisters' vigilance. That they should afterwards have tried to atone with gentleness for what they had made her suffer did not avail with him. Monica and Margaret now impressed him with their unworldly beauty in a strange way, for they became sinister figures like the Lady Geraldine in Christabel, sly, malignant sylphs set in ambush to haunt the romantic path of his love. He was intensely aware that he ought not to resent their interference, but that he ought, in fact, to acknowledge the justice of it, and by a stoical endeavor prove himself entitled to the cares of this long engagement. Actually Guy was enduring a violent jealousy, and illogically he began to declare how the others were jealous of him and Pauline. The consciousness that he could not carry her off into immediate marriage galled him, and he suffered all the pangs of an unmerited servitude. He and Pauline became the prisoners of tyrants who were urging them to accept the yoke of convention; the more he suffered the more he knew in his heart that he was culpable, and the more culpable he recognized himself the more he chafed against the burden of waiting. All the resolutions that with the announcement of their betrothal had seemed to sail before a prospering breeze now turned and beat up against adverse influences, and were every moment in danger of being irreparably wrecked.