“England expects every man to do his duty,” replied Miss Blandflower courageously, but she looked infinitely relieved when Mrs. Tregaskis laughed again, and said tolerantly:
“No, no, Minnie, I don’t think we’ll expose you to contamination. If anyone goes, I’ll go myself—but we’ll see what the next letters are like.”
The next letters, however, from the Porthlew point of view were far from satisfactory.
“This tone of little Frances’ won’t do at all,” declared Bertha very decidedly, at breakfast. “Quite a new departure! Talking about being ‘received into the Church at once,’ and ‘discussing further plans’ when she gets home. I never heard of such a thing—what are little girls coming to, pray?”
“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that’s nice,” muttered Minnie in the inward voice which she reserved for her frequent and irrelevant quotations.
“Nice, indeed!” retorted Mrs. Tregaskis crisply, “anything but, my poor Minnie. This won’t do at all. Miss Frances must be popped back into her little place again, I’m afraid. You needn’t scowl at me, Rosamund. Nobody is going to be at all unkind or brutal, but if this is the effect that Roman Catholicism is going to have on Frances, why, the sooner she’s taken away from the convent the better. In any case I never gave her leave to stay for more than a few days’ Retreat, and now she writes quite calmly that she is to be ‘received’ at the end of the week, without so much as with your leave or by your leave.”
“If she’s made up her mind, Bertha—and I conclude that she has—you can’t stop her, and you’d better leave her alone,” growled Frederick.
“Nonsense, dear. She’s not so emancipated as all that, yet. Besides, we have given a sort of consent, in a way, by letting her go to this place—though it was against my better judgment, as you know.”
“Your better judgment, Bertha, is only less to be relied on than your original impulse.”
Mrs. Tregaskis invariably treated these speeches of her lord and master as a recondite form of pleasantry. She therefore laughed valiantly at the epigrammatic insult, and merely told Minnie to give her the marmalade.