I daresay she did not. Bessie is that sort of woman that never will see anything until it has actually occurred. If her children died, she would make as great a fuss over them—perhaps more—than mothers who have guarded theirs from their infancy upwards; yet she will let them eat improper food, and get damp feet, and remain out in the burning sun without any covering to their heads; and if you remonstrate with her, her invariable excuse is, that they have always done so before and got no harm. As if the fact of a wrong being permitted should make it a right; or because we have fallen from the top of a house once without injury, we may cast ourselves thence headlong each day without impunity.
I really never did think, when Bessie and I were girls together, that she would turn out such a ninny.
‘What has worried you then, since it is not the baby?’ I demanded presently.
‘Hush! I can’t tell you before the children. It’s an awful business, and I wouldn’t have them hear of it for worlds. Will you lay your bonnet aside, and have dinner with us as you are? or I’m afraid it may get cold. Lily—Charley—Tommy, lay down these toys, and come to the table at once. Put Bessie up on her high chair; and somebody go and call Annie. Ah! Dolly, my dear, how well you have kept your figure! What would I not give to be as slim and neat as you are.’
And although, of course, I would not compare one advantage with the other, yet I must say that the pleasures of having a family would possess a great drawback to me, if I were compelled at the same time to become as rotund and untidy in appearance as poor Bessie is at present. And I believe the chief thing Tom Maclean fell in love with was her pretty rounded little figure. Alas! alas!
But I am keeping the early dinner waiting. As soon as it was despatched, with the usual accompaniments of cutting up the children’s meat, wiping their mouths, and preventing their throwing the tumblers at each other’s heads, Mrs Maclean rose and offered to show me to my bedroom. It was next to her own, and communicated with it by a door.
‘This dear old place!’ I exclaimed as I entered it; ‘you are making it very pretty, Bessie. Aren’t you glad that you have come into such a handsome property, instead of having been stuck down in a modern villa, with the plaster on the walls only half-dry?’
But Bessie did not appear to appreciate my congratulations.
‘Dolly,’ she said, as she sunk down into a chair, ‘I would change Poplar Farm for the poorest little villa that was ever built.’
‘My dear girl, what do you mean?’