“You can leave all that to me.”
“Cicely, bless her! is a bit of a tomboy. I’m sure she would shrink from—from—you know.”
Mrs. Roden enjoined silence, uplifting a large, capable hand.
“My dear Arthur, you have the disabilities of your sex. Never having suffered from excess of modesty yourself, you imagine that young girls are immaculately innocent and ignorant. Pray purge your mind of that! They are nothing of the sort. They discuss everything nowadays with a refreshing candour that is not the least significant sign of the times. Now for a word of advice to you. If you want her, go for her—go for her! Young girls fall easily in love with the first energetic bidder. I take it you are the first?”
“I—I think so, Mary.”
“Then I repeat—go for her!”
Seldom indeed did Mrs. Roden use expressions even approximating to slang. Wilverley saw that her interest was seriously engaged.
III
Mrs. Roden had been right in assuming Cicely to be neither immaculately innocent nor ignorant of what she termed “essential facts.” She and Arabella had discussed marriage and even motherhood quite naturally, but not often, being mainly engrossed with tennis and hockey and, subsidiary to these, their work in class. Arabella insisted that they must be near the head of the procession and maintain an honourable position without undue “mugging.” A good report, indeed, at the close of her school career had transmuted thousands of pills into the pearls which Lady Selina so admired.
Arabella, it will be remembered, had this strangle-hold over Cicely. Lady Tiddle had graduated in life at a shoe factory. Arabella acknowledged, with pardonable pride, that her second cousin on the maternal side was a housemaid. Cicely was friendly with housemaids at the Manor, but, in strict obedience to Lady Selina, never familiar with them. Arabella pronounced this abstention to be a loss, not a gain. She had talked very freely with the second cousin.