“He went up by the afternoon train,” Eve answered with a stately air. “He is dining with some old chums to-night, and I don’t think he’ll be home before Saturday.”
“I have not been fortunate enough to meet him yet.”
“I’m afraid he’s rather unsociable,” answered Eve, suddenly serious, while over all the young faces there spread a shadow of seriousness. “He lets us accept invitations—and I’m sure people are very kind to go on asking us when we can’t pay them the proper respect of new frocks.”
“What do people care about frocks?” exclaimed Jenny, the third daughter, with a Republican air. “If we are asked out it is because we are liked, in spite of our old frocks.”
“Or because people are sorry for us,” said Eve, gravely.
“I don’t think people are ever sorry for youth and beauty,” said Vansittart. “Both are objects of envy rather than of compassion.”
“Oh, I can’t follow you there,” answered Eve; “everybody is young once. Youth is as common as chickweed or groundsel, and it lasts such a short time; and if one has to spend that one bright little bit of life in a state of perpetual hard-uppishness, I am sure one deserves to be pitied.”
She talked of her poverty with an alarming frankness. Most people hide their indigence as if it were an ugly sore, or if they speak of it, speak softly, apologetically, or with an assumed lightness, as if their poverty were not really poverty, but only a genteel limitation of means, implying none of the shortcomings of actual want. But this girl talked of her old frock and her father’s poverty, without a blush.
“Father won’t visit anywhere now,” she said. “He can’t forget that he once lived in a big house, and had a thousand acres of shooting, and bred his own pheasants. He can hardly bring himself to shoot other people’s birds, even when they ask him to their big shoots.”
“Your old home was in the North, I think?” said Vansittart, delighted at being let into the family secrets.