“You may be a little stouter than you were at sixteen, perhaps, but not at all too stout.”
“O, but I am! I know it, I feel it. Don’t endeavour to spare my feelings, aunt. It is useless. I know I am fat. Rosalind says I ought to marry; but I tell her it’s absurd. How can anybody ever care for me now I am fat? They would only want my money if they asked me to marry them,” concluded Pamela, clinging to the plural.
“My dear Pamela, do you wish me to tell you that you are charming, and all that you ought to be?” asked Mildred, laughing.
“O, no, no! I don’t want you to spare my feelings. Everybody spares one’s feelings. One grows up in ignorance of the horrors in one’s appearance, because people will spare one’s feelings. And then one sees oneself in a strange glass; or a boy in the street says something, and one knows the worst. I think I know the worst about myself. That is one comfort. How lovely it is here!” said Pamela, with a sudden change of mood, glancing at Mildred with a little pathetic look as she remembered the childish figure that must be for ever missing from that home picture.
“I am so glad to be with you,” she murmured softly, nestling up to Mildred’s side, as they sat together on a rustic bench; “let me be useful to you, let me be a companion to you, if you can.”
“You shall be both, dear.”
“How good to say that! And you won’t mind Box?”
“Not the least. If he will be amiable to Kassandra.”
“He will. He has been brought up among other dogs. We are a very doggy family at the Hall. Would you think he was worth a hundred and fifty guineas?” asked Pamela with ill-concealed pride, as the scion of illustrious progenitors came up and put his long lean head in her hand, and conversed with her in a series of expressive snorts, as it were a conversational code.
“I hardly know what constitutes perfection in a fox-terrier.”