Chapter Eight.
Teresa’s fortune made less difference in her life than she had expected. It gave her pleasure to be able to do more than plan for others, but she was uncertain whether her fresh powers added to their happiness. There was Sylvia; Sylvia was provided for otherwise, and Wilbraham’s worst enemy would not have accused him of sordid motives. Perhaps he was not uninfluenced by social advantages. Perhaps it had been more easy for him to fall—coolly and decorously to fall—in love with a girl who was dressed with care, and no longer tramped along wet pavements, than with one obliged to study petty and occasionally disfiguring economies. But there was another side to this “perhaps,” a side which Donna Teresa was trying not to see, and, at times, successfully succeeded in suppressing. Had he ever been really in love?
But she was sure he never could be what she called really in love.
Next to Sylvia came her grandmother. Her grandmother was old. Age wants to have the rugged bits of life’s road made smooth for steps no longer buoyant and unfaltering. Teresa thought of a hundred ways for doing this, yet, after all, they came to very little. For as Mrs Brodrick had foreseen from the first, we can’t wrench off the habits of a lifetime without hurt.
“My dear,” she said with a laugh at herself, “I’ve always burnt one candle instead of two. When you light three my room looks a great deal nicer, but I’m uneasy. I blow one out as soon as ever I get the chance.”
“I shall put in electric light,” Teresa declared. “You are a wicked woman.”
“I’m a frugal one if you please, and it’s disturbing at my time of life to find one’s virtues turned into vices. I can’t afford it. I haven’t time to get a new set.”
Under the jest there lay earnest, as Teresa’s quick sympathy instantly discovered.
“Granny,” she said wistfully, perching herself on the arm of her grandmother’s chair, “is there really nothing I can do? You’re sure it isn’t a horrid mean little feeling of pride?”