"The hairpins are sticking into me all over," she gasped, "and the weight of the fringe is like a furnace on my forehead; but never mind."
"It isn't at all becoming either," said Annie.
Antonia looked at her with large eyes of reproach.
"Do you think I want it to be becoming?" she said. "That would be the final straw."
The fashionable dress was not only bought, but put on, and Mrs. Bernard Temple scarcely knew her daughter when she saw her back again.
"I'm in misery," said Antonia; "but a promise is a promise. My dear mother, when you are married to Sir John, that dear, dear old man, you need not expect to see me often at the Grange."
"I really do not see, Antonia, why you should speak of your future father as so very old."
"He's old to me," said Antonia. "I always speak of people as I find them."
"You are a most extraordinary girl," remarked her mother.
But she made this remark so often that Antonia did not think it necessary to reply.