‘Miss Askam didn’t patronise her, then?’ said Roger.
‘Well, no, or you may be sure she would not have been sitting in the midst of them in that fashion. It seems Johnson insisted that his wife should call upon Miss Askam soon after she came. He said Otho’s goings on were nothing to them, and they had no right to assume that Miss Askam would be anything but delighted to receive the wife of her parish priest. So Mrs. Johnson put on her best gown and went, sorely against her will, having made up her mind to find a female edition of Otho. You may judge of her relief at what she did find.’
‘I don’t see how we can be expected to enter into the fulness of Mrs. Johnson’s joy, seeing that we don’t know Miss Askam. And why she should have assumed that——’
‘Botheration to you and your assumptions! Will you let me tell my own tale in my own way, and don’t be a prig. Mrs. Johnson found, as she said, a simple, unassuming young lady, as unpretentious as if she had lived in a four-roomed cottage. She seemed downright glad to see Mrs. Johnson, and made her have tea, and asked her about the children; and, above all, she didn’t offer to send her home in the carriage.’ (Roger gave vent to a short, sardonic laugh. He had a powerful, insane objection to Ada’s being ‘sent home in the carriage’ from Balder Hall.) ‘But she did put on her things and walk half the way home with her. She asked if she might go and see the children. Of course Mrs. Johnson gave a few particulars about their establishment, which seems to me to have been highly unnecessary——’
‘Very,’ echoed Roger. ‘Why can’t people stand on their own legs, as their own legs, and not be always deprecating the fact that they are not just the same shape as the legs of other people? Well!’
‘It was not long before Miss Askam presented herself, at an hour when they were all in, and in five minutes she’d made friends with every one of them, from the biggest to the least. So now she’s a friend of the family, and her name a household word, like yours, Mike.’
‘Isn’t it rather odd that she should chum so with the Johnsons?’ asked Roger, going fully into the question.
‘No, I don’t think so. I think she finds it congenial. She’s always welcome, and she knows it. And there’s another thing,—she is a woman of the right sort.’
‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ asked Roger, while Michael sat silent.
‘Well, it would take a good while to explain all I mean by that. But when you come across such a woman, you know her quickly for what she is, or I’m sorry for you if you don’t; you ain’t up to much. The right sort of woman, when she has griefs and sorrows of her own—and that young thing has, unless her sad eyes are very misleading—does not seek her distractions where the wrong sort of woman does. I don’t mean that she shuts herself up like a nun—that’s no good; but she does seem to fly to charity, by which I don’t mean carrying round tracts and soup-tickets; she flies to charity, I say, as a duck takes to water. I don’t know that she is always so anxious to forget her troubles—the right sort of woman. You can’t forget a constant pain; you couldn’t forget chronic neuralgia if you had that blessing given you; but she does find a right use for them—the use they were intended for by Him who sent them to her,’ said the little doctor, lowering his voice; ‘and she best alleviates her own griefs by helping others out of theirs. I’m convinced that Miss Askam is such a woman. She’s sad—very sad—she is, for all her riches and all her beauty; and—Michael, what must you be rattling that blind down for, just when I’m talking? It’s your own garden outside. You can’t be overlooked, if that is what you are afraid of.’