"I don't fancy you will ever make any very dangerous mistakes!" he said.
"Ah! but I might," the girl insisted. "You see I have always been told what to do."
"Always?" Dickie asked, more for the pleasure of watching her stand thus than for any great importance he attached to her answer.
"Oh yes!" she said. "First by our nurses, and then by our governesses. They were not always very kind. They called me obstinate. But I did not mean to be obstinate. Only they spoke in French or German, and I could not always understand. And since I have grown up my elder sisters have told me what I ought to do."
It seemed to Richard that the girl's small, round chin quivered a little, and that a look of vague distress invaded her soft, ruminant, wide-set eyes.
"And so I should have been very frightened, now, unless I had had Lady Calmady to tell me."
"Well, I think there's only one thing my mother will need to tell you, and it won't run into either French or German. It can be stated in very plain English. Just to do whatever you like, and—and be happy."
Lady Constance stared at the speaker with her air of gentle perplexity. As she did so undoubtedly her pretty chin did quiver a little.
"Ah! but to do what you like can never really make you happy," she said.
"Can't it? I'm not altogether so sure of that. I had ventured to suppose there were a number of things you and I would do in the future which will be most uncommonly pleasant without being conspicuously harmful."