"That is just what I am saying, my dear. I highly commend your very proper view. It would be quite my own. Indeed, I am sure, were I in your position, I could not endure dependence, even if my father were a much richer man than yours is. I cannot understand any one not doing anything to secure independence."
Margaret smiled, rather a hard kind of smile, as she thought there was one thing she certainly would not do to attain independence, and that one thing was precisely what Miss Martley had done in becoming Mrs. Carteret.
The elder lady continued to talk for some time longer in the same strain, and at length she asked Margaret how she intended to procure occupation.
"I have not thought about that part of it yet," she replied.
Then Mrs. Carteret allowed the truth to slip out; then she betrayed her real consciousness of the meanness she was perpetrating. She shifted her eyes uneasily away from Margaret's face, as she said,
"I should not mention the matter to any one about here if I were you, Margaret. People talk so oddly, and your father might not like it. I always think, when anything of the kind is to be done, it had better be away from home, and among a different connection."
Margaret answered her with hardly-disguised contempt:
"Your warning comes rather late. I have already told Lady Davyntry of my intention, which she approves as much as you do. She has been good enough to promise me her friendship and interest in settling matters to my satisfaction. As for papa, he will not mind how I do it, when I can succeed in reconciling him to my doing it at all."
Mrs. Carteret felt strongly tempted to get into a violent rage, and relieve her vexation, which was intense, by saying anything and everything which anger might suggest to her, to Margaret.
That Lady Davyntry, who had taken no notice of the advances she had made towards an intimacy which would have been a social triumph to Mrs. Carteret--Lady Davyntry who, since Margaret's return, had gone so near ignoring her stepmother's existence as was consistent with the observance of the commonest civility--that she should be admitted behind the scenes, that Margaret should instruct her in the dessous des cartes, was gall and wormwood to her. She had never been very far off hating Margaret hitherto; her quiet stealthy dislike to the girl now deepened into the darker feeling; and though she merely replied, "O, then, in that case, it cannot be helped," Margaret knew that that minute marked an era in Mrs. Carteret's feelings towards her.