Lydia, failing to see the drift of the question, answered unhesitatingly:
“Yes, I think it would. It’s the part I should have minded most.”
A guilty remembrance flashed across her mind of yet another axiom of Grandpapa’s—“Don’t refer everything back to yourself.”
She wished that she had remembered it earlier, when Rosie looked at her strangely, and then said:
“I believe you would mind that most—what other people would say and think about you, I mean. What an inhuman kid you are!”
Lydia felt almost more bewildered than offended.
“Isn’t there anybody you care for beside yourself?” said Rosie Graham slowly. “I’ve been watching you ever since you came to us. Of course you’re very clever, and a cut above the rest of us—I know all that—and you’re awfully sweet and nice to everybody, and never say cattish things about anyone—but what’s it all for? You don’t care a damn for anybody that I can see. And then you talk about this chap who’s going with you—this Margoliouth—and whether he wants you to be engaged or not. And I don’t believe you’ve once thought whether you could care for him, or he for you. Why, this girl I was telling you about was crazy about her fellow. That was what broke her up—not the having made a fool of herself, and wondering if the others at her old shop weren’t laughing at her. But that’s simply beyond you, isn’t it? I don’t believe you know what caring for anybody means.”
The two girls looked at one another in silence.
Rosie’s accusation not only came as a shock to Lydia, but it carried with it an inward conviction that was disconcerting in the extreme.
Lydia, no coward, faced the unpalatable truth, and instinctively and instantly accepted it as such.