“I hope you exaggerate, Charlotte. There may be disinterested characters.... But, in any case, surely Tina need not be unhappy here, with us who love her so dearly.”
“Tina an old maid? Never!” Charlotte Lovell rose abruptly, her closed hand crashing down on the slender work-table. “My child shall have her life ... her own life ... whatever it costs me....”
Delia’s ready sympathy welled up. “I understand your feeling. I should want also ... hard as it will be to let her go. But surely there is no hurry—no reason for looking so far ahead. The child is not twenty. Wait.”
Charlotte stood before her, motionless, perpendicular. At such moments she made Delia think of lava struggling through granite: there seemed no issue for the fires within.
“Wait? But if she doesn’t wait?”
“But if he has withdrawn—what do you mean?”
“He has given up marrying her—but not seeing her.”
Delia sprang up in her turn, flushed and trembling.
“Charlotte! Do you know what you’re insinuating?”
“Yes: I know.”