"What people for Juliet to take up with!" exclaimed Salome, in a tone of disgust. "She will be wanting to become an actress next. There is no accounting for what Juliet will do. She seems to have no sense at all."
"Don't make her out worse than she is," pleaded her mother. "She knows nothing of the father and son, and I daresay the girl is not so bad; Juliet seems very fond of her."
"I only wish you could see her!" said Hannah. "She dresses in the most extreme style, wears flashy jewellery, and is generally vulgar. Her complexion is frightfully got up. As for her work, their form-mistress tells me it could hardly be worse. We all wish she had not come to the school, for she will do us no credit."
"Juliet should be forbidden to have anything to say to her," remarked Salome.
"It is easy to say that," replied her mother, "but you know it does not do to take extreme measures with Juliet. Once drive her into defiance, and you can do nothing with her. I believe she is persisting in this intimacy just because she knows you are set against it."
"That is likely enough," said Hannah, in a bitter tone. "Well, I only hope that you may never regret that you have not taken more extreme measures with Juliet. You will not wait dinner for her, mother?"
Mrs. Tracy made a sign of dissent, and in a few minutes they were seated at the dinner-table. The mother was depressed, and ate with little appetite.
She stood in some awe of her elder daughters, with their exemplary conduct and correct views. She always felt that they had had some right to resent her marriage with Captain Tracy, a gay, dashing Irish officer, some years younger than herself. Hannah and Salome had been mere children at the time, but they had not failed to show their resentment. When, shortly after his marriage, the captain's regiment was ordered to India, a relative of their father offered to take charge of the two girls during their mother's absence abroad. Mrs. Tracy was well pleased with this arrangement.
She had been absent for seven years when she came back to England with her pretty though faded face, framed by a widow's sombre veil, and bringing with her a wilful, fascinating little girl, with sunny hair and violet eyes. The gay captain had met with an accident at a polo-match, from the effects of which he had died shortly afterwards. His widow mourned him sincerely, though he had been but a sorry husband, sublimely indifferent to her comfort and welfare, as long as he could squander her money on his own pleasures. But the indifference had been delicately veiled, and only on rare occasions had Mrs. Tracy, with a bitter heart-pang, suspected its existence. Captain Tracy pursued his extravagances in a gentlemanly manner, and never failed to treat his wife with lover-like, caressing tenderness, so that she loved him passionately to the last, and paid his debts of honour, time after time, with but faint remonstrance.
But the large sums she had realised for this purpose, in spite of every objection raised by the Scotch solicitor who managed her affairs, were a serious drain on her resources. She came home to find the property her first husband had left her considerably diminished, and to learn that it behoved her for the rest of her life, by rigid economy and self-denial, to make amends for Captain Tracy's extravagance. The lesson was a painful one, embittered by her sense that her elder girls had a right to reproach her with careless neglect of their interests.