“But why shouldn’t a nice face mean something nice?” put in the rash young woman again.
The fact was that Mabin had been charmed with the sweet pink-and-white face and blue eyes of Mrs. Dale, their new neighbor at “The Towers,” and was mentally comparing the widow’s childlike charms with the acidulated attractions of the Vicar’s dowdy wife.
“And why,” pursued Mabin, as both the elder ladies seemed to pause to gain strength to fall upon her together, “shouldn’t she be just as sorry for her husband’s death because she looks nice over it? It seemed to me, when she sat near us at church on Sunday, that she had the saddest face I had ever seen. And as for her corrupting us by her ‘tone,’ she won’t have anything to do with any of us. Mrs. Warren has called upon her, and the Miss Bradleys and Mrs. Peak and a lot more people, and she’s always ‘not at home.’ So even if she is wicked, I should think you might let her stay. Surely she can’t do us much harm just by having her frocks better made than the rest of us.”
When Mabin had finished this outrageous speech, there was an awful pause. Mrs. Rose hardly knew how to administer such a reproof as should be sufficiently scathing; while Mrs. Bonnington waited in solemn silence for the reproof to come. Mabin looked from her step-mother’s face to that of the Vicar’s wife, and thought she had better retire before the avalanche descended. So she gathered up her work hastily, running her darning-needle into her hand in her excitement, muttered an awkward apology and excuse for her disappearance at the same time, and shot out of the room in the ungainly way which had so often before caused her stepmother to shudder, as she did now.
When the door had closed upon the girl, closed, unfortunately, with a bang, Mrs. Bonnington sighed.
“I am afraid,” she said, unconsciously assuming still more of her usual clerical tone and accent, “that Mabin must be a great anxiety to you!”
Mrs. Rose sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, wearily.
“If you could realize how great an anxiety,” she murmured in a solemn tone, “you would pity me! If it were not that Mr. Rose gives his authority to support mine in dealing with her, she would be absolutely unmanageable, I assure you.”
“A froward spirit! And one singularly unsusceptible to good influences,” said the Vicar’s wife. “However, we must persevere with her, and hope for a future blessing on our labors, even if it should come too late for us to be witnesses of her regeneration.”
“I am sure I have always done my best for her, and treated her just as I have my own children. But you see with what different results! The seed is the same, but the soil is not. I don’t know whether you knew her mother? But I suppose Mabin must take after her. She is utterly unlike her father.”