She suddenly flushed, she even showed her small teeth. For an extraordinary moment she looked like a little cat.
“Robin will hare it,” she cried, grinding a delicate fist into the palm on her knee. “She’s not eighteen and she’s a beauty and she’s taken up by a perfectly decent old duchess. She’ll have everything! The Dowager will marry her to someone important. You’ll help,” she turned on him in a flame of temper. “You are capable of marrying her yourself!” There was a a brief but entire silence. It was broken by his saying,
“She is not capable of marrying me.”
There was brief but entire silence again, and it was he who again broke it, his manner at once cool and reasonable.
“It is better not to exhibit this kind of feeling. Let us be quite frank. There are few things you feel more strongly than that you do not want your daughter in the house. When she was a child you told me that you detested the prospect of having her on your hands. She is being disposed of in the most easily explained and enviable manner.”
“It’s true—it’s true,” Feather murmured. She began to see advantages and the look of a little cat died out, or at least modified itself into that of a little cat upon whom dawned prospects of cream. No mood ever held her very long. “She won’t come back to stay,” she said. “The Duchess won’t let her. I can use her rooms and I shall be very glad to have them. There’s at least some advantage in figuring as a sort of Dame Aux Camelias.”
CHAPTER XXVII
The night before Robin went away as she sat alone in the dimness of one light, thinking as girls nearly always sit and think on the eve of a change, because to youth any change seems to mean the final closing as well as the opening of ways, the door of her room was opened and an exquisite and nymphlike figure in pale green stood exactly where the rays of the reading lamp seemed to concentrate themselves in an effort to reveal most purely its delicately startling effect. It was her mother in a dress whose spring-like tint made her a sort of slim dryad. She looked so pretty and young that Robin caught her breath as she rose and went forward.
“It is your aged parent come to give you her blessing,” said Feather.
“I was wondering if I might come to your room in the morning,” Robin answered.