So in time May was married--married with such pomp and ceremony that feelings seemed left out altogether, and if tender-hearted Mrs. Stubbs shed a few tears at parting with the first of all her brood, they were smothered among the billows of lace which bedecked her, and nobody but herself was any the wiser.
After this it became an established custom that Flossie should take May's place in the carriage; and it was not long before she managed to persuade her mother that it was time for her to throw off Miss Best's yoke altogether, and go out as a young lady of fashion.
Before very long Mrs. Stubbs began dearly to repent herself of her weakness; for Flossie, with her emancipation, seemed to have left her old self in the schoolroom, and to have taken up a new character altogether. She became very refined, very fashionable, very elegant in all her ideas and desires.
"My mother really is a great trial to me," she said one day to Sarah. "She's very good, and all that, you know; but she's so--well, there's no sort of style about poor mother. And it is trying to have to take men up and introduce them to her. And they look at her, don't you know, as if she were something new, something strange--as if they hadn't seen anything like her before. It's annoying, to say the least of it."
"Well, if I were you," retorted Sarah hotly, "I should say to such people, and pretty sharply, 'If my mother is not good enough for you, why, neither am I.'"
"But then, you see, I am," remarked Flossie, with ineffable conceit.
"You don't understand what I mean," said Sarah, with a patient sigh.
"That's because you're so bad at expressing yourself, my dear," said Flossie, with a fine air of condescension. "It all comes out of shutting yourself up so much with that squeaking old violin of yours. I can't think why you didn't go in for the guitar--it's such a pretty instrument to play, and it backs up a voice so well."
"But I haven't got a voice," cried Sarah, laughing.
"Oh, that doesn't matter. Lady Lomys hasn't a voice either, but she sings everywhere--everywhere."