"Joel!" Persis' tone for all its gentleness showed plenty of decision.
"Thank you, but this time I don't want you."
"What's that?"
"Some other time when you feel like running up to the city for a few days, we'll go together. But just now I've got some business to attend to."
"You mean I'd be in the way?"
"Yes."
"Persis." Joel spoke in heart-broken accents. "I guess the Good Book ain't far wrong in calling money the root of all evil. Up till you come into this prop'ty, you was all a man could ask for in a sister." Like many another, Joel found his blessings brightest in retrospect. "But now you're as set as a post and as stubborn as a mule. It's pretty dangerous, Persis, when a woman gets the idea she knows all that's worth knowing. As the poet says, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' I feel in my bones that there's trouble coming out of this wild-goose chase of yours."
It was not characteristic of Joel to keep his grievances secret. Wherever he went for the next few days, he fairly oozed reproach and resentment. And on the Monday when Persis took the ten o'clock train for Boston it was generally understood that she had declined the pleasure of her brother's company and was bent on an errand whose nature she alone knew.
"She'll put up at a hotel, I suppose," said Mrs. Hornblower. "She'll
have to, for there's nobody in Boston she knows well enough to visit.
A single woman staying alone at a hotel sounds dreadful improper to me.
Robert would never allow me to do such a thing, never for a minute.
And nobody even knows what she's gone for."
But Annabel Sinclair thought she knew. "I shouldn't wonder," she told
Diantha, "if when Persis Dale gets back we'd see startling changes."
Her confidential tone was balm to Diantha's spirit. For since the daughter's sudden leap into maturity, the relations between the two had been strained, the instinct of sex rivalry overmastering such shadowy maternal impulses as had outlived Diantha's babyhood. The girl responded eagerly to the advance.