"I hope I have," returned Mr. Weatherhead, mopping his flushed face with a very large red pocket-handkerchief. "I hope I have, for the present. But if you attempt to contradict a word of what I have been saying, I'll begin again and go still further!"
"There, there, then that's settled. But I am thinking of the future. Supposing I died to-morrow, what's to become of May? I have nothing to leave her. My bit of property goes back to Dobbs's family, and all right and fair, too. I've nothing to say against my husband's will. But people like the Hadlows, who invite May, and make much of her, have no idea that she has no one to look to but me. I don't say they'd give her the cold shoulder if they did know it; but it would make a difference. As it is, they talk to her about her aunt, Mrs. Dormer-Smith, and her cousin, Lord This, and her connection, Lady T'other, and a kind of a—what shall I say?—a sort of atmosphere of high folks hangs about her. She's Miss Miranda Cheffington, with fifty relations in the peerage. If she was known only as the grandchild of Mrs. Dobbs, the ironmonger's widow, she would seem mightily changed in a good many eyes. Sometimes it comes over me as if I was letting May go on under false pretences."
"Why, she has got fifty relations in the peerage, hasn't she?"
"A hundred, for all I know. But folks are not aware that her father's family take no notice of her. She hardly knows it herself."
"But her aunt, Mrs. Dormer-Smith, writes to her, doesn't she?"
"Oh, a line once in a blue moon, to say she's glad to hear May is well, and to complain of the great expense of living in London."
"The selfish meanness of that woman is beyond belief."
"Well—I don't know, Jo. She's a poor creature, certainly. But I feel more a sort of pity for her than anything else."
"Do you? It's only out of contradiction, then."
"Not altogether," said Mrs. Dobbs, laughing good-humouredly. "I made her out pretty well that time I took May up to London before she went back to school."