"I did listen, I didn't say anything. I was thinking all the time how horrid it was for him to have to do what he did."
"Well, my dear child, that was no concern of yours, you need not have been unhappy about it."
"No, mama. But I was; and unhappy that I had to sit to listen to him. I wanted desperately to get away, that was all. I came the very instant that I could."
"Instead of which, I should have said," explained the eager Bessie, "I should have said: 'Until this moment I have not given your brother a thought, Sir Francis. But now that you have dared—dared to insult me and my family in such a way, I will tell you what I will do. I will marry him to-morrow morning. I'd have done it too," Bessie declared, looking round the table, eyes shining with strong self-approval.
"My dear Bessie. Don't let your feelings run away with you so much," Mrs.
Day reproved.
"Deleah has no dignity, mama. Any one can see Deleah behaved without the least dignity."
Deleah listened miserably, pretending not to hear. She did not agree with Bessie's idea of what was dignified, but she knew that she had cut a poor figure. She felt humiliated, hurt, helpless. Sir Francis Forcus had been for her her ideal of what a man and a gentleman should be. He had helped her in the day of her necessity, and she had set him at once as her hero on a pinnacle, and had looked up to him and worshipped him secretly, and from afar. She knew that she had sat before him this afternoon shamed, and helpless, and childish; filled with as much sorrow for him who was so clumsily wounding her as for herself. She had not desired to retaliate; she would not have been revenged on him if she could; the only effort of which she had been capable had been the effort to make him think that she had been as little wounded as possible, that the situation was not a horrible one to her.
Yet when they asked her why she had not shown more spirit she could not explain. She could only sit silent and miserable, and let them talk.
Even Mr. Gibbon, usually so preoccupied and silent now, talked. He said that he supposed Sir Francis Forcus called hisself a gentleman, but that he, the Manchester man, had always had his doubts on the subject, and that one day he hoped for the opportunity of telling him that he was a snob. And more, with unwanted, stammering loquacity, to that effect, with fire of eye, with un-called-for, excited repetition.