"You seem to, be very singularly ignorant of my wife's status in society——" he is beginning is a rather terrible tone, when Barbara, with a little graceful gesture, checks him. She puts out her hand and smiles up at him, a wonderful smile under the circumstances.
"Ah! that is just it," she says, sweetly, but with determination. "She is ignorant where we are concerned—Joyce and I. If she had only spared time to ask a little question or two! But as it is——" The whole speech is purposely vague, but full of contemptuous rebuke, delicately veiled. "It is nothing, I assure you, Freddy. Your mother is not to be blamed. She has not understood. That is all."
"I fail even now to understand," says the old lady, with a somewhat tremulous attempt at self-assertion.
"So do I," says the antique upon the lounge near her, bristling with a wrath so warm that it has unsettled the noble structure on her head, and placed it in quite an artful situation, right over her left ear. "I see nothing to create wrath in the mind of any one, in the idea of a young—er——" She comes to a dead pause; she had plainly been going to say young person—but Frederic's glare had been too much for her. It has frightened her into good behavior, and she changes the obnoxious word into one more complaisant.
"A young what?" demands he imperiously, freezing his aunt with a stony stare.
"Young girl!" returns she, toning down a little, but still betraying malevolence of a very advanced order in her voice and expression. "I see nothing derogatory in the idea of a young girl devoid of fortune taking a——"
Again she would have said something insulting. The word "situation" is on her lips; but the venom in her is suppressed a second time by her nephew.
"Go on," says he, sternly.
"Taking a—er—position in a nice family," says she, almost spitting out the words like a bad old cat.
"She has a position in a very nice family," says Monkton readily. "In mine! As companion, friend, playfellow, in fact anything you like of the light order of servitude. We all serve, my dear aunt, though that idea doesn't seem to have come home to you. We must all be in bondage to each other in this world—the only real freedom is to be gained in the world to come. You have never thought of that? Well, think of it now. To be kind, to be sympathetic, to be even Commonly civil to people is to fulfil the law's demands."