“My bedroom!” cried the girl with unfeigned surprise. “Why, what other could I have chosen? It is the smallest in this side of the house, except papa’s dressing-room!”
“It is the only one that I could possibly make into a boudoir for myself. I don’t know whether you expect me to give up all the little comforts and refinements of a lady.”
This speech grated on the ears of both Olivia and her father. Mr. Denison, after ten years of his second marriage, was by no means so absorbed by marital devotion as to ignore the descent he had made in taking for his second wife a woman scarcely refined enough to have been maid to his first. Being a man of affectionate temperament, fond of home, and sensitively grateful for kindness real or supposed, it was natural that in his keen sorrow at his first wife’s death, he should fall a prey to the first woman, near at hand, who should find it worth her while to capture him. This, in the natural course of things, proved to be his daughter’s governess.
The clever, superficially educated daughter of a small provincial shopkeeper, the second Mrs. Denison, on her elevation to a rank above her birth, was determined to avail herself to the full of every privilege to which her new station entitled her. One of these privileges she conceived to be the possession of a “boudoir,” though what the precise significance of it was to her it was not easy to see, as she entered it very rarely, while the whole house was not large enough for her to “sulk” in. But in overlooking this necessity of her station, Mrs. Denison chose to consider that Olivia had wished to put upon her a slight of the kind she could least brook, and no pains the girl had taken in other directions could induce her to overlook the indignity.
Again Mr. Denison, with unusual rashness, stepped in.
“My dear Susan,” he expostulated, “Olivia must have a room to sleep in. And there must be a spare room kept for Ernest. Where else could she stow herself?”
“There are two good rooms in the wing——” began Mrs. Denison.
“But, my dear, they are damp and full of mouldy old things that——”
He was interrupted in his turn by his daughter.
“I haven’t the least objection to sleeping in the wing, papa. I left those rooms untouched for Mrs. Denison to decide what she would have done with them. I will take the large room with pleasure, mouldy old things and all.”