Judy took her hand from my arm, and with an almost martial stride the little creature walked up to the speaker, and stood before her defiantly. I could see them quite well in the fuller light at the end of the passage, where there stood a lamp. I followed slowly that I might not interrupt the child’s behaviour, which moved me strangely in contrast with the pusillanimity I had so lately witnessed in Mr Stoddart.
“Sarah,” she said, “you know you are telling a lie. Grannie does not want me. You have not been in the dining-room since I left it one moment ago. Do you think, you bad woman, I am going to be afraid of you? I know you better than you think. Go away directly, or I will make you.”
She stamped her little foot, and the “white wolf” turned and walked away without a word.
If the mothers among my readers are shocked at the want of decorum in my friend Judy, I would just say, that valuable as propriety of demeanour is, truth of conduct is infinitely more precious. Glad should I be to think that the even tenor of my children’s good manners could never be interrupted, except by such righteous indignation as carried Judy beyond the strict bounds of good breeding. Nor could I find it in my heart to rebuke her wherein she had been wrong. In the face of her courage and uprightness, the fault was so insignificant that it would have been giving it an altogether undue importance to allude to it at all, and might weaken her confidence in my sympathy with her rectitude. When I joined her she put her hand in mine, and so walked with me down the stair and out at the front door.
“You will take cold, Judy, going out like that,” I said.
“I am in too great a passion to take cold,” she answered. “But I have no time to talk about that creeping creature.—Auntie DOESN’T like Captain Everard; and grannie keeps insisting on it that she shall have him whether she likes him or not. Now do tell me what you think.”
“I do not quite understand you, my child.”
“I know auntie would like to know what you think. But I know she will never ask you herself. So I am asking you whether a lady ought to marry a gentleman she does not like, to please her mother.”
“Certainly not, Judy. It is often wicked, and at best a mistake.”
“Thank you, Mr Walton. I will tell her. She will be glad to hear that you say so, I know.”