“Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people,” she volunteered. “I’ve often wondered why?”
“Like that, by nature,” I suggested.
“Perhaps,” she said carelessly as if she did not care to pursue that speculation. “You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?” she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic.
“I heard that she had been a governess. I didn’t know that she had ever been with the Jervaises,” I said.
“She was there for over two years,” pursued Anne. “She is French, you know, though you’d probably never guess it, now, except for an occasional word here and there. She left years before Brenda was born. Brenda is so much younger than the others. There’s eight years between her and Robert, the next one. Olive’s the eldest, of course, and then Frank.”
I made some conventional acknowledgment for this information. I was wondering if she were merely talking to save the embarrassment of silence. We had drifted, apparently, a long way from any matter of personal interest and I was hesitating as to whether I should not attempt a new opening, when she began again with the least little frown of determination.
“I’m talking about them, because if you are to be Arthur’s friend you ought to know more or less how things are between us and the Jervaises, and I might just as well say right out at once that we don’t like them; we’ve never liked them. Mother, more particularly. She has got something against them that she has never told us, but it isn’t that.” Her frown was more pronounced as she went on, “They aren’t nice people, any of them, except Brenda, and she’s so absolutely different from the rest of them, and doesn’t like them either—in a way.”
“You don’t even except Frank?” I mumbled. I could not resist the opportunity she had offered to ask that too pointed question; but I looked down at the floor as I spoke; I wanted her to understand that I was not cross-examining her.
“I knew you saw us,” she returned in the same even tone that she had used all through this conversation of ours. She had not once raised or lowered her voice. She might have been speaking a part, just to test her memory.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “Quite by accident, of course. I had no idea that he had come up here. I hadn’t seen him since breakfast.”