“Yes. I forgot it last night,” he said. “And I hate to see a thing not working properly.”
Dear Banks! I did not know, then, how characteristic that was of him.
I returned to the subject in hand.
“What do you propose to do, then?” I asked. “To get their consent?”
“Just stick to it,” he said.
“You think they’ll give way?”
“They’ll have to, in the end,” he affirmed gravely, and continued in a colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper. “It’s just their respectability they care about, that’s all. If they were fond of her, or she of them, it would be another thing altogether. But she’s different to all the others, and they’ve never hit it off, she and them, among themselves. Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss Olive, for instance.”
“Do they?” I said, in astonishment. I had been romantically picturing Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this new light.
“She never got on with ’em, somehow,” Banks said. “Anyway, not when they were alone. Always rows of one sort or another. They couldn’t understand her, of course, being so different to the others.”
I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details. His insistence on Brenda’s difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it. He was, as Miss Tattersall had said, “infatuated,” but I put a more kindly construction on the description than she had done—perhaps “enthralled” would have been a better word.