“Sophia, you’re in your dotage,” Caroline cried. “A Mallett and a nun! Well, she could pray for the rest of us, I suppose.”
“But I would rather you were married, dear,” Sophia said serenely. “And we have known the Sales all our lives. It would have been so suitable.”
“So dull!” Rose murmured.
“And we need praying for,” Caroline said. “You’d be dull either way, Rose. Have your fling, as I did. I’ve never regretted it. I was the talk of Radstowe, wasn’t I, Sophia? There was never a ball where I was not looked for, and when I entered the ballroom”—she gave a display of how she did it—“there was a rush of black coats and white shirts— a mob—I used just to wave them all away—like that. Oh, yes, Sophia, you were a belle, too—”
“But never as you were, Caroline.”
“You were admired for yourself, Sophia, but with me it was curiosity. They only wanted to hear what I should say next. I had a tongue like a lash! They were afraid of it.”
“Yes, yes,” Sophia said hastily, and she glanced at Rose, afraid of meeting scepticism in her clear young eyes; but though Rose was smiling it was not in mockery. She was thinking of her childhood when, like a happier Cinderella, she had seen her stepsisters, in satins and laces, with pendant fans and glittering jewels, excited, rustling, with little words of commendation for each other, setting out for the evening parties of which they never tired. They had always kissed her before they went, looking, she used to think, as beautiful as princesses.
“And men like what they fear,” Caroline added.
“Yes, dear,” Sophia said. A natural flush appeared round the delicate dabs of rouge. She hoped she might be forgiven for her tender deceits. Those young men in the white waistcoats had often laughed at Caroline rather than at her wit; she was, as Sophia had shrinkingly divined, as often as not their butt, and dear Caroline had never known it; she must never know it, never know it. She drew half her happiness from the past, as, so differently, Sophia did herself, and, drooping a little, her thoughts went farther back to the last year of her teens when a pale and penniless young man had been her secret suitor, had gone to America to make his fortune there—and died. She had told no one; Caroline would have scorned him because he was shy and timid, and he had not had time to earn enough to keep her; he had not had time. She had a faded photograph of him pushed away at the back of a drawer of the walnut bureau in the bedroom she shared with Caroline, a pale young man wearing a collar too large for his thin neck, a young man with kind, honest eyes. It was a grief to her that she could not wear that photograph in a locket near her heart, but Caroline would have found out. They had slept in the same bed since they were children, and nothing could be hidden from her except the love she still cherished in her heart. Some day she meant to burn that photograph lest unsympathetic hands should touch it when she died; but death still seemed far off, and sometimes, even while she was talking to Caroline, she would pretend to rummage in the drawer, and for a moment she would close her hand upon the photograph to tell him she had not forgotten. She loved her little romance, and the gaiety in which she had persisted, even on the day when she heard of his death and which at first had seemed a necessary but cruel disloyalty, had become in her mind the tenderest of concealments, as though she had wrapped her secret in beauty, laughter, music and shining garments.
“Oh, yes, dear Rose,” she said, lifting her head, “you must be married.”