“And never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “But no—mamma—can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all—and when uncle's money came you sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be—I won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us—and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all.”
“I never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch of animation.
“Oh no—you never said it,” Julia admitted, “but what else can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that—and I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go——”
“But I did want you to go,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
“Well, then, when I come back—when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,—why, you won't even come and look at the house!”
“But I don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
“Well, then, you needn't!” said Alfred, rising. “Nobody will ask you again.” “Oh yes they will,” urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody—and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.
After his disappearance from the scene—unlamented, to the best of Julia's juvenile perceptions—there had been relatively peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
Alfred and his mother were Thorpes—that is to say, people who necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath, however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence—and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
“Oh yes they will,” she repeated, and warned her brother into the background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. “We are your children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us.”