For the benefit of his mother and his fiancée, Frederic vowed that, when next he met Bennett Lawrie, he would horsewhip him.
“At least,” said Mrs. Folyat for Serge’s benefit, “I have one son who is a man.”
They might refuse to visit Annette, but they could not forget her. Now that she was gone, they realised her more nearly than they had ever done when the whole burden of their comfortable existence rested upon her shoulders. Mrs. Folyat grew more and more querulous as the household fell into worse and worse confusion. She demanded an extra servant; Francis said they could not afford it. She dismissed the hobgoblin, now a fully developed gnome, and, one after another, engaged a series of incompetent, untidy, and immoral females. At last, when one of them corrupted the washerwoman—the washing was done at home in those days on a Monday and Tuesday—and drew her into a wholesale conspiracy of theft, Mrs. Folyat, in despair, sent for Minna and implored her to take the burden of housekeeping off her hands. With a fair show of grace Minna set to, but it was not long before she went to see Annette. Annette was delighted. The days without Bennett were very long, and in their two rooms there was not enough work to occupy her hands for the morning; also, very frequently, she had no money at all and could not go out into the town. She thought, too, that Mina’s coming was a sign that her mother was on the point of relenting. Annette never doubted that she loved her mother, and her disapproval often weighed heavily on her spirit.
With a child’s pride in a new toy she displayed her two rooms and Bennett’s handiwork on the walls and wood and the bulrushes he had painted in oils on the bathroom window.
“What an awful street you live in,” said Minna.
“Is it?” Annette had never considered it æsthetically. It was the place she lived in, the scene of her honeymoon. She had filled it with romance and held it holy.
“Ma says,” remarked Minna, settling herself largely in Bennett’s wicker-chair so that she seemed to overflow it and fill the room,—“Ma says that she is quite sure Bennett will take to drink.”
“I don’t believe Ma could have said anything so odious.”
“Then you don’t know Ma.”
Minna took stock of the room, and she was divided between pity and contempt for her sister—pity that she should live in such a poor place, contempt that she should be satisfied and pleased with it, and she thought with a shudder of the day when the scales should fall from the lovers’ eyes and they should see themselves as they were, in that place, as it was. Minna had so often opened her heart to love only to expel it on finding it ridiculous that she could not conceive of any affection as permanently seated. She was like an inept gardener, who might plant spring flowers in his borders and deem it natural and inevitable that summer and autumn should be empty of all save weeds. She had cultivated a taste for falling in love, and always lost patience with it before she came to love.