‘I imagine so, as I was opening the bazaar,’ said Mrs Keeling, with some dignity.
‘Of course, yes,’ said Alice, with enthusiasm. ‘How stupid of me not to have thought of that. That lovely spider! Do remember to tell Jane not to dust it away. I haven’t seen Mrs Fyson for a long time, nor Julia. I must write a note to Julia wishing her good-bye before I go to Brighton. Dear Julia.’
She got up and overturned a tray of pens in her eagerness to write to Julia. This, of course, gave fresh provender to her mother’s intuition. She could put two and two together as well as most people, and hardly ever failed to make the result ‘five.’ It was quite obvious that Mr Silverdale had proposed to Alice, and that in consequence Mrs Fyson’s ill-founded expectations for Julia had fallen as flat as a card-house. No wonder Alice could afford to forgive her friend.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear you speak like that, dear,’ she said, ‘because the last time you mentioned Julia’s name was to tell me that you didn’t want to hear it mentioned again. Mrs Fyson, too, I dare say she is a very well-meaning woman, though she does go about saying that all sorts of things are happening without any grounds except that she wants them to.’
Alice made a large blot on her paper in agitation at hearing this allusion, and took another sheet of paper.
‘And I am sure Julia has an excellent heart,’ she said enthusiastically, recalling Mr Silverdale’s definite assurance that ‘it’ was not Julia. At the time she had been so full of more personal emotion that she had scarcely cared; now the balm of that was divinely soothing.
‘Quite an excellent heart,’ she said. ‘Julia has always been my friend, except just lately. And now it is all right again. Don’t you think that quarrels sometimes lead to even warmer attachments, Mamma?’
Mrs Keeling tried to recollect something about quarrels she had been party to. There was the case of the two little tiffs she had had lately with her husband, once when he had distinctly sworn at her, once when he had asked her so roughly what she meant with regard to her little joke about Norah and the catalogue. One of those, so it suddenly seemed to her now, had led to a pearl-pendant, which seemed to illustrate Alice’s theory of quarrels leading to warmer attachments. She had not connected the two before. She wondered whether Mrs Fyson would say that that was very clever too.... She determined to think it over when she had leisure. At present she was too curious about Alice to attend to it. But she would think it over at Brighton.
‘Don’t you think they lead to warmer attachments, Mamma?’ repeated Alice, finding she got no answer.
Mrs Keeling was very cunning. She would apply this to Alice’s quarrel with Julia and just see what Alice would say next.