"You forget," said Hannah, "that Mrs. Campbell very distinctly declined to engage your services."
"Thereby showing herself a sensible woman," said Juliet. "Oh, I am so glad! I feel just crazy with delight!"
"And you act as if you were crazy," said Salome, as she stitched vehemently at a garment she was finishing for the Dorcas Society.
"Well," said Juliet, with a sigh of intense satisfaction, "there is some chance of my getting a little of my own way now."
"As if you had not taken your own way all your life long!" said Salome.
"Who would have thought of such a thing?" said Mrs. Tracy, as she entered the room, her face radiant with happy excitement. "My husband's brother! And I hardly knew that he had a brother! Indeed, when first he mentioned him to me, he told me he felt sure that he was dead. It is most strange!" And sitting down, she described very vividly the interview with Mr. Ralph Tracy, and repeated all he had said.
It did not strike her that her elder daughters listened with little interest. She was too thrilled and elated herself by what had happened to mark how it affected these others; but Hannah and Salome were painfully conscious of being out of it all.
The event of the afternoon was nothing to them; it was not their uncle who had presented himself in this remarkable manner, and Hannah felt bitterly that Juliet, who deserved to be severely reprimanded for her conduct at Mrs. Campbell's, would now escape without even a reproof. She had no right to the wild delight she was exhibiting. Hannah's common-sense withheld her from introducing the subject of Juliet's misdoings at this moment. She knew that her mother was in no mood for discussing them, and it would be wisest to pass them over in silence.
But none the less, Hannah resented the light-heartedness Juliet was displaying. Would it always be thus? Would the girl never be made to feel the consequences of her flagrant wilfulness? It seemed so. It appeared as if life were to be made exceptionally smooth and easy for Juliet's feet. There was to be no further thought of her being a governess or earning her own living in any way. And Hannah, who had worked very hard all her life, first as a schoolgirl, ambitious of distinction, and later as a painstaking, conscientious teacher, unconsciously felt aggrieved at the contrast which the lot of her young sister seemed to present to her own.
"Juliet will get her own way in everything now, you will see," she remarked to Salome that night, as they were going to bed.