"You must be out of your mind to talk to me like this," says Lady Rylton at last. Something in the girl's air tells her that there is some little touch of devilment in it, some anger, some hatred. "But, naturally, I make allowances for you. Your birth, your surroundings, your bringing up, all preclude the idea that you should know how to manage yourself in the world into which you have been thrown by your marriage with my son."
"As for my birth," says Tita slowly, "I did not choose it; and you should be the last to throw it in my teeth. If you disapproved of it before my marriage with your son, why did you not say so?"
"There were many reasons," says Lady Rylton slowly, deliberately. "For one, as you know, your money was a necessity to Maurice; and for another——" She breaks off, and scans the girl's face with an air of question. "Dare I go on?" asks she.
"Why should you not dare?" says Tita.
A quick light has come into her eyes.
"Ah, that is it! I have something to say to you that I think, perhaps, should be said, yet I fear the saying of it."
"For you, or for me?" asks Tita.
She has her small brown hands clasped tightly together in her lap now. There is something nervous in the tension of them. Where, where is Margaret? For all that, she looks back at her mother-in-law with a clear and fearless glance.
"For you," says Lady Rylton—"for you only! But before I begin—I am a very nervous person, you know, and scenes," again pressing her handkerchief to her face, "upset me so—tell me, do tell me, if you have a good temper!"
"I don't know," says Tita. "Why?"