“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to accept her—”
Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?”
“Your new daughter-in-law.”
I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have imagined it. Her words too, gave me the same painful impression.
“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.”
And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, whom I had not yet laid eyes on, with an immense pity.
“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us with her least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We prepare a nice welcome for her. I wonder how she will like us.”
But my mother had the last word.
“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves agreeable,” she said, putting away her handkerchief into her little silk bag. I saw that she would shed no more tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter.