“I see.” Prudence did see, very clearly. She smiled suddenly. “How grateful he must feel to you,” she added.
Matilda resented this very much in the manner Prudence decided in which Mr Jones would have resented it.
“That matters only in regard to this particular living,” she said. “Ernest would succeed in any case; he is so clever.”
Prudence’s accident, with the unfortunate complication which had effected Major Stotford’s entry upon the scene, was used by Agatha, backed by brother William, as a sufficient reason against future cycling. Agatha went to an immense amount of trouble in her efforts to gain her father’s veto against Prudence riding again. She persuaded him to get rid of the bicycle as the surest means of avoiding fresh misadventures; and rendered him so nervous with her gloomy forebodings that he did consent to part with the bicycle; but he reserved his veto against riding until he saw how Prudence viewed a possible prohibition. He could not deny her pleasure merely because the idea of her riding made him nervous. Bobby had met with accidents when he first cycled; but it never had been suggested that Bobby should give up riding from a fear he might break his neck.
The damaged cycle was disposed of; William saw to that. Agatha undertook to inform her sister; she also sought to prevail with her to give up the exercise. She enlarged upon her father’s anxiety, so injurious in the case of a man of his years, and pointed out to Prudence that duty demanded this sacrifice of her pleasure to his anxious love.
Prudence heard her out in silence, a stony silence which betrayed nothing of the rage that burned within her breast. With the finish of the oration her chin tilted aggressively.
“This is your doing,” she said.
“It is father’s wish,” Agatha replied. “The bicycle was sold by his orders.”
“Oh!” Prudence exclaimed, with a gesture of impatience. “I know. What’s the good of talking? I am sick of all this pretence of anxiety. You hate me to have any enjoyment. You never rest—you never have rested, from seeking to make my life colourless and dull. You are satisfied only when you keep me sewing, or working in the parish. Well, I won’t sew any more—for fear I prick my fingers, and I won’t work in the parish either from a nervous dread of having my morals contaminated. If I can’t do the things I like, I won’t do the things I don’t like either.”
Miss Agatha’s anger, if more controlled, was every whit as great as Prudence’s. She gazed down upon her sister where she lay upon the sofa with eyes of cold dislike. Always they had been antagonistic. She had resented her father’s second marriage bitterly, and had disliked his young wife: the earlier resentment, and the dislike for Prudence’s mother, influenced her largely in her antagonism towards the child of the marriage, the child who was dearer to their father than any of his other children, and who was so unlike the rest. But she had, according to her own view, conscientiously done her duty by her young sister: the accusation of jealous injustice stung her; she felt that she had not merited that.