“Well! here is Fanny then, who is seldom without an ailment. She will be able to suggest something, perhaps—won’t you, Fan?”
“I have not always an ailment,” said Fanny, pettishly; “and I am not going with mamma. I have a headache to-day, and I shan’t go out.”
Mr. Thornton looked annoyed. His mother’s eyes were bent on her work, at which she was now stitching away busily.
“Fanny! I wish you to go,” said he, authoritatively. “It will do you good, instead of harm. You will oblige me by going, without my saying anything more about it.”
He went abruptly out of the room after saying this.
If he had stayed a minute longer, Fanny would have cried at his tone of command, even when he used the words, “You will oblige me.” As it was, she grumbled.
“John always speaks as if I fancied I was ill, and I am sure I never do fancy any such thing. Who are these Hales that he makes such a fuss about?”
“Fanny, don’t speak so of your brother. He has good reasons of some kind or other, or he would not wish us to go. Make haste and put your things on.”
But the little altercation between her son and her daughter did not incline Mrs. Thornton more favourably towards “these Hales.” Her jealous heart repeated her daughter’s question, “Who are they, that he is so anxious we should pay them all this attention?” It came up like a burden to a song, long after Fanny had forgotten all about it in the pleasant excitement of seeing the effect of a new bonnet in the looking-glass.
Mrs. Thornton was shy. It was only of late years that she had had leisure enough in her life to go into society; and as society she did not enjoy it. As dinner-giving, and as criticising other people’s dinners, she took satisfaction in it. But this going to make acquaintance with strangers was a very different thing. She was ill at ease, and looked more than usually stern and forbidding as she entered the Hales’ little drawing-room.