“What are your symposia?” chuckled Frances, beginning to think Woodend couldn’t be so much behind Haversfield itself.
“Why, on Saturday mornings Carlyon takes his boys, and his sister takes her girls, and we’ve a meeting in the big rectory dining-room. Then the lot of us talk like fits about those blessed ‘current events’ our respected teachers have been driving into us all the week. It’s prime fun, once we get started. Carlyon and his sister do the starting. When they’re on opposite sides, we’ve rare larks; for they pitch into one another like mad—quite civilly, you know. Then we chaps and Miss Carlyon’s crew follow suit, and go for one another in fine style. Gracious! You should have heard Max Brenton and Florry Fane last Saturday! It was our breaking-up day, and we had an extra grand symposium. Max and Florry are no end good at argufying.”
Frances heard the names of these friends of Austin with the pleasant anticipations natural to a sociable girl just about to make trial of a new home, new surroundings, new companions. She hoped this “Max and Florry” would be “good” for something besides “argufying”—good for comradeship of the only kind possible to a nature whose characteristics were deep-rooted and strong. Half-hearted alliances were outside Frances’s comprehension; her love and trust must be given freely and fully, or not at all.
“In her last letter Mamma told me I was to be one of Miss Carlyon’s girls after the holidays. That will seem funny at first, now that I have got used to a big school. It was nice at Haversfield, Austin. I want to stay with Mamma and you, of course, else I should like to go back. Miss Cliveden—my house-mistress—was so jolly. She used to make one feel as if one wanted to be of some good, if one could.”
“You can be of lots of good here,” said Austin comfortably. “It’s no sense a fellow having a sister if she’s away at school. Max says if he had a sister he’d think himself lucky, for she would be able to teach him how to make a bed properly. That’s a thing he often needs to do for his worst cases, and he does not quite understand it.”
“What do you mean?”
Austin declined to explain. At the moment he was too much occupied with his own affairs to have leisure for Max’s. He was eager to convince Frances that she could be of supreme use to him personally; and Frances, before whose eyes had lately gleamed a vision of a wider range for her girlish energies, listened, and sympathized, and promised, as only the best of sisters could. She was quite sure that Austin wanted her most of all. He always had wanted her, and she never had disappointed him.
They had been brought up together, and educated by the same governesses and tutors until a few months before this story opens. Then Austin’s childish delicacy had for the first time threatened to become serious, and his mother had carried him off to London for distinguished medical advice. For years Mrs. Morland’s home had been in Allerton, a large provincial town to which she had first been attracted because it was the dwelling-place of an old friend, who had since passed away. The London doctors recommended a country life for Austin; and, after some weeks of search for a suitable spot, Mrs. Morland fixed on Woodend, a village which had everything desirable in the way of soil, air, and scenery. Her household gods were removed from Allerton to Woodend in the course of a bright April, and she and her son settled down in the pretty home she had bought and furnished.
During all this time of unrest, Frances had been quietly at work at Haversfield, where she had been sent in order that her education might not be interrupted. She had spent the Easter holidays with a school friend, because at the time her mother was superintending the removal to Woodend, and Austin was paying a visit to a Scotch cousin.
If Mrs. Morland had guessed under what influences her daughter would come, she certainly would not have sent her to Haversfield. Not only had she no regard for the “learned lady”, but she set no value at all upon the womanly accomplishments which were unable to secure social prestige. Miss Cliveden’s definition of “society” would have astonished Mrs. Morland; and her gospel of labour, preached with her lips and in her life, would have seemed to Frances’s mother uniquely dull and quixotic.