"If I promise I perform," returned Mr. Pole.
"Our Hillford people have cause for complaint," Mr. Barrett observed. And to Emilia: "You will hardly favour one party more than another, will you?"
"I am for that poor man Jim," said Emilia, "He carried my harp evening after evening, and would not even take sixpence for the trouble."
"Are you really going to sing there?"
"Didn't you hear? I promised."
"To-night?"
"Yes; certainly."
"Do you know what it is you have promised?"
"To sing."
Adela glided to her sisters near at hand, and these ladies presently hemmed Emilia in. They had a method of treating matters they did not countenance, as if nature had never conceived them, and such were the monstrous issue of diseased imaginations. It was hard for Emilia to hear that what she designed to do was "utterly out of the question and not to be for one moment thought of." She reiterated, with the same interpreting stress, that she had given her promise.