“I was just thinking the same thing,” cried Mrs Enderby; “but I believe I should not have said so if you had not. I was afraid it might be a sad disappointment to poor Philip; and this prevented my saying quite so much as I should have done to Mrs Grey. Now I find it is all right, I shall just call in, and express myself more warmly on my way home.”
“I beg Philip’s pardon, I am sure,” said Mrs Rowland, “for supposing for a moment that he would think of marrying into the Grey connexion. I did him great injustice, I own.”
“By no means,” said Philip. “Because I did not happen to wish to marry Miss Ibbotson, it does not follow that I should have been wrong if I had. It was feeling this, and a sense of justice to her and myself, which made me refuse to answer your questions, some weeks ago, or to make any promises.”
“Well, well: let us keep clear of Mrs Grey’s connexions, and then you may talk of them as you please,” said the sister, in the complaisance of the hour.
Philip remembered his pledge to himself to uphold Mrs Grey as long as he lived, if she should prove right about Mr Hope and Hester. He began immediately to discharge his obligations to her, avowing that he did not see why her connexion was not as good as his own; that Mrs Grey had many excellent points; that she was a woman of a good deal of sagacity; that she had shown herself capable of strong family attachments; that she had been gracious and kind to himself of late in a degree which he felt he had not deserved; and that he considered that all his family were obliged to her for her neighbourly attentions to his mother. Mrs Enderby seized the occasion of her son’s support to say some kind thing of the Greys. It gave her frequent pain to hear them spoken of after Mrs Rowland’s usual fashion; but when she was alone with her daughter, she dared not object. Under cover of Mr Rowland’s presence occasionally, and to-day of Philip’s, she ventured to say that she thought the Greys a very fine family, and kind neighbours to her.
“And much looked up to in Deerbrook,” added Philip.
“And a great blessing to their poor neighbours,” said his mother.
“Dr Levitt respects them for their conscientious dissent,” observed Philip.
“And Mr Hope, who knows them best, says they are a very united family among themselves,” declared Mrs Enderby.
Mrs Rowland looked from one to the other as each spoke, and asked whether they were both out of their senses.