“It’s always rather a risk, isn’t it, to take other people’s children like that, even though they are relations. But they’re dear little girls, and so good and brave.”
“They seem to me singularly intelligent, and altogether rather remarkable.”
“Yes, indeed, one does feel that,” returned Lady Argent with the sort of gentle cordiality with which she almost always acclaimed any opportunity of praising others, and which consequently detracted considerably from the value of her approbation. “They are not at all ordinary, I feel sure, and that’s why it seems so very fortunate that Bertie, of all people, should take them. She will understand them so wonderfully. Her love of children is one of the most characteristic things about her, and she always says herself that she’s never quite stopped being a child in some ways, and so understands children. They come to her instinctively. Children and animals always know, they say.”
Ludovic had met this aphorism before, and disagreed with it profoundly, but he had no wish to deprive his mother of any of the gentle Victorian beliefs which ruled her life. At thirty years old, Ludovic Argent was still young enough to feel superior.
But at this moment his thoughts were altogether engaged with the little girls who yesterday had been all but unknown to him. Presently, to his own surprise, he said:
“Mother, you wouldn’t consider the idea of having those two here, I suppose?”
“You don’t mean for good, Ludovic?”
He did, but a certain strain of moral cowardice, always latent in the imaginative, made him temporize.
“Well—for a long visit, perhaps. I—I think they’d be happier near their old home, and in their own part of the world.”
“But, my dear boy,” said his astonished mother, “you surely don’t mean to suggest that I should adopt two children of whom I know hardly anything, when they’ve already been offered an excellent and much more suitable home with a relation? It would be quite impossible. Do think of what you’re saying.”