‘You’ll help me, Princess?’
She did not answer.
‘You won’t be hard, Alice? It’s a wretched business, and I don’t know what I shall do if you throw me over. I can’t do without you, old girl.’
‘I can’t tell mother, Dick. You know very well what it’ll be. I daren’t do that.’
But even that task Alice at last took upon herself, after another half-hour’s discussion. Alas! she would never again feel towards her brother as before this necessity fell upon her. Her life had undergone that impoverishment which is so dangerous to elementary natures, the loss of an ideal.
‘You’ll let me stay over to-morrow?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing very pleasant to go back to, and I don’t see that a day ‘ll matter.’
‘You can stay if you wish. I’m going to take you to have tea with Adela now. If you stay we’ll have her to dinner to-morrow.’
‘I wonder whether we shall get along?’ Alice mused.
‘I don’t see why not. You’ll get lots of things from her, little notions of all kinds.’
This is always a more or less dangerous form of recommendation, even in talking to one’s sister. To suggest that Adela would benefit by the acquaintance would have been a far more politic procedure.