“Not to me,” said Miss Glendower. “I don’t trust her.”
“But to some people. And as Harry says, at election times every one who can do anything must be let do it. Cut them—do anything afterwards, but at the time—you know he talked of it when Mr. Fison and he were here. If you left electioneering only to the really nice people——”
“It was Mr. Fison said that, not Harry. And besides, she wouldn’t help.”
“I think you misjudge her there, dear. She has been asking——”
“To help?”
“Yes, and all about it,” said Mrs. Bunting, with a transient pink. “She keeps asking questions about why we are having the election and what it is all about, and why Harry is a candidate and all that. She wants to go into it quite deeply. I can’t answer half the things she asks.”
“And that’s why she keeps up those long conversations with Mr. Melville, I suppose, and why Fred goes about neglecting Mabel——”
“My dear!” said Mrs. Bunting.
“I wouldn’t have her canvassing with us for anything,” said Miss Glendower. “She’d spoil everything. She is frivolous and satirical. She looks at you with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight all one’s earnestness.… I don’t think you quite understand, dear Mrs. Bunting, what this election and my studies mean to me—and Harry. She comes across all that—like a contradiction.”
“Surely, my dear! I’ve never heard her contradict.”