And when Lady Cecilia would have put down his paws—“Let him alone, let him alone, dear, honest, old fellow.”
“But the dear, honest, old fellow’s paws are wet, and will ruin your pretty new pelisse.”
“It may be new, but you know it is not pretty,” said Miss Clarendon, continuing to pat Neptune’s head as he jumped up with his paws on her shoulders.
“O my dear Esther, how can you bear him? he is so rough in his love!”
“I like rough better than smooth.” The rough paw caught in her lace frill, and it was torn to pieces before “down! down!” and the united efforts of Lady Cecilia and Helen could extricate it.—“Don’t distress yourselves about it, pray; it does not signify in the least. Poor Neptune, how really sorry he looks—there, there, wag your tail again—no one shall come between us two old friends.”
Her brother came in, and, starting up, her arms were thrown round his neck, and her bonnet falling back, Helen who had thought her quite plain before, was surprised to see that, now her colour was raised, and there was life in her eyes, she was really handsome.
Gone again that expression, when Cecilia spoke to her: whatever she said, Miss Clarendon differed from; if it was a matter of taste, she was always of the contrary opinion; if narrative or assertion, she questioned, doubted, seemed as if she could not believe. Her conversation, if conversation it could be called, was a perpetual rebating and regrating, especially with her sister-in-law; if Lady Cecilia did but say there were three instead of four, it was taken up as “quite a mistake,” and marked not only as a mistake, but as “not true.” Every, the slightest error, became a crime against majesty, and the first day ended with Helen’s thinking her really the most disagreeable, intolerable person she had ever seen.
And the second day went on a little worse. Helen thought Cecilia took too much pains to please, and said it would be better to let her quite alone. Helen did so completely, but Miss Clarendon did not let Helen alone; but watched her with penetrating eyes continually, listened to every word she said, and seeming to weigh every syllable,—“Oh, my words are not worth your weighing,” said Helen, laughing.
“Yes they are, to settle my mind.”
The first thing that seemed at all to settle it was Helen’s not agreeing with Cecilia about the colour of two ribands which Helen said she could not flatter her were good matches. The next was about a drawing of Miss Clarendon’s, of Llansillan, her place in Wales; a beautiful drawing indeed, which she had brought for her brother, but one of the towers certainly was out of the perpendicular. Helen was appealed to, and could not say it was upright; Miss Clarendon instantly took up a knife, cut the paper at the back of the frame, and, taking out the drawing, set the tower to rights.