“Then there’s an end of it.”
“How tiresome you are, Peter!” she said petulantly. “I’ll never believe she can stand up against him if he takes the trouble to make love to her. Anyway, I think it very hard she should fly out at me when my intentions were so good.”
“Well, I hope your good intentions won’t do any harm.”
“How can they? She’d never thought of him. You’re rather priggish this morning, Peter, but I may as well tell you that I mean some of them to go on their bicycles—Arthur, and Charlie Carter at all events. I shall give her the chance. If she likes it better, she can drive.”
The same question was in Claudia’s mind. She felt hunted, disdainful, indignant, all at once. First Harry and then Captain Fenwick thrust down her unwilling throat. It was persecution! She, who would have none of them, who was thinking of much more important business, who had meant to live her own life, and, so far as in her lay, to be mistress of her fate, bitterly resented an interruption which seemed to place her at once on a level with all the other pleasure-loving idle girls of the day, whose heads were full of offers and settlements. She! Claudia raised her chin, and looked like an angry nymph. If Fenwick had passed that way he would have met with scant civility. She thought Lady Wilmot impertinent, she wished she had not come to the place, and then suddenly, to her added annoyance, found her eyes brimming with hot tears, which put the final touch to her humiliation. She dashed them away with scornful fierceness. “So,”—she rated herself—“so it has come to this, that if a stupid thing happens, you cry about it! Oh, do pluck up a little spirit and resolve not to think twice about such folly! Most likely it is all her invention, or else he has just been amusing himself in the way men do, and pretending—pretending!—to her that he cares. You should expect to meet such men, Claudia. And what ought you to do? Certainly not trouble yourself about them. Turn yourself into a stone wall. I suppose you have sense enough left to go on just as usual? But I wish, I do wish she hadn’t said it! It makes everything disagreeable and stupid. It shan’t, though! What’s the use of having a will of one’s own if one can’t use it? If he wants to speak, let him, and there’s an end of it; and if he has the better sense to hold his tongue, I shall know she was wrong. And if, as I suppose, we are to go on our bicycles to this tiresome place to-day, I’m not going to blush prettily and draw back; I shall do exactly as I should have done if she hadn’t come out and spoilt my morning. The most annoying part of it all is that I have quite forgotten what I meant to do with those hollies. I know that I had some capital notion, and it has gone. Oh, how tiresome men are!”
Claudia sat wrathfully down, pulled out her pocket-book, rested her chin on her hands, and forced her mind to stern consideration of her plans. In some degree this brought back her calm, so that when she appeared at luncheon, and ways and means for reaching Barton Towers were discussed, she did not allow a shadow of hesitation to appear in her manner. Lady Bodmin clung to the victoria, and Lady Wilmot made a little face of dismay. Claudia said calmly that of course she could bicycle, and inwardly hoped that Captain Fenwick would not be of the party. But this was far from his intention.
“I thought you hated calls?” said Lady Wilmot mischievously.
“One has to suffer sometimes.”
Lady Wilmot laid down her fork.
“You might stay at home.”