For all this Lady Rodney is devoutly thankful. She is glad of the girl's absence. She has no desire to exhibit her, prejudice making Mona's few defects to look monstrous in her eyes. Yet these same defects might perhaps be counted on the fingers of one hand.
There is, for example, her unavoidable touch of brogue, her little gesture of intense excitement, and irrepressible exclamation when anything is said that affects or interests her, and her laugh, which, if too loud for ordinary drawing-room use, is yet so sweet and catching that involuntarily it brings an answering laugh to the lips of those who hear it.
All these faults, and others of even less weight, are an abomination in the eyes of Lady Rodney, who has fallen into a prim mould, out of which it would now be difficult to extricate her.
"There is a set of people whom I cannot bear," says Chalmers, "the pinks of fashionable propriety, whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behavior, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them."
Such folk Chalmers hated; and I agree with Chalmers. And of this class is Lady Rodney, without charity or leniency for the shortcomings of those around her. Like many religious people,—who are no doubt good in their own way,—she fails to see any grace in those who differ from her in thought and opinion.
And by degrees, beneath her influence, Mona grows pale and distrait and in many respects unlike her old joyous self. Each cold, reproving glance and sneering word,—however carefully concealed—falls like a touch of ice upon her heart, chilling and withering her glad youth. Up to this she has led a bird's life, gay, insouciant, free and careless. Now her song seems checked, her sweetest notes are dying fast away through lack of sympathy. She is "cribbed, cabined, and confined," through no fault of her own, and grows listless and dispirited in her captivity.
And Geoffrey, who is blind to nothing that concerns her notices all this, and secretly determines on taking her away from all this foolish persecution, to London or elsewhere, until such time as their own home shall be ready to receive them.
But at this break in my history, almost as he forms this resolution, an event occurs that brings friends to Mona, and changes in toto the aspect of affairs.