He looked over the top of his egg at his wife. “I don’t see why they shouldn’t go. We can have a cab from Poole’s.”
Aunt Amy, who, like Mrs. Norris, was very careful with other people’s money, burst out:
“But think, Herbert—all the expense of a cab! And it will have to wait to take them back again. And Poole’s charges go up and up. I’m sure the children will do very nicely at home.”
How gladly at that moment would Helen, Mary and Jeremy have put poison in Aunt Amy’s tea or stabbed her in the back with a bread-knife! However, little as they realized it, she was doing everything to help their cause.
Mr. Cole, looking at Aunt Amy very severely, said:
“Thank you, Amy, but that’s my affair. Poor as we are, we can still afford a cab. I think it will be good for the children to go. Mrs. Mulholland’s kindness must not be rejected.”
At that moment in came Uncle Samuel, late and unshaven as usual, and the conversation was not continued. The affair was settled by the kindness of a neighbour, Mrs. Carstairs, who, having been also invited to take her small boy, offered to share a cab and chaperon the Cole children.
No child of to-day can possibly conceive what it was to us children in the old days in Polchester to be invited to a dance. For the grown-ups in Polchester there were a great many balls—more, perhaps, than there are to-day—but for the children there was very little—some afternoon parties, perhaps one pantomime, little more.
To the Cole children an evening dance—a dance out of Polchester with a drive at both ends of it—was wonder beyond wonder. Life was instantly at the merest murmur of its name transformed into something exquisite, rainbow-coloured, fantastical.
Helen’s transports were all selfish. She was not a bad girl did you grant her her devastating egotism; she cared for her family, she was neither vindictive nor mean, not too greedy, and not too vain; but she drove towards her purpose with the cold, clean-cut assurance of a steel knife cutting paper—and that purpose was the aggrandizement and public splendour of Helen Cole.