As I had just been contrasting it mentally with the blue room at Rutledge, I could not help another blush, and a little confusion, as I replied that it did very well.
"Mamma seemed to have an idea that you were quite a little girl," she continued, "and that this was very nice for you. It opens out of the nursery, you see, and if you don't mind Esther's squalling, it is very nice."
She laughed a little, and I tried to smile as I answered that I liked children, and should not mind being near my little cousin.
"I hope you'll like Esther," said Grace, with a shrug of her shoulders. "When she isn't kicking Félicie, or howling to be taken out, or squalling after mamma, she's sitting on the floor in the sulks, and as that's the least troublesome of her moods, nobody interferes with her. Oh, she's a sweet child!"
And Grace's laugh sounded more like thirty than fifteen. I was ashamed of myself for being so embarrassed and abashed by a girl so much my junior, but there was something about Grace that I was not used to; a sort of gutta-percha insensibility, a lazy coolness that I had not expected from her drawling, listless way. Nothing of the woman seemed developed in her but the sharpness; and with that she was born, I suppose. She was still a little girl in her tastes and pursuits; loved to play with Esther, whom I afterward found she bullied and teased shamefully; did not aspire to beaux and young-ladyhood, but contented herself with keeping the sharpest imaginable lookout upon the concerns of every one in the house, and having a finger in every possible pie; being at once the pertest and most persevering of medlers.
She kept up a desultory talk while I was unbraiding my hair and preparing for bed; asked questions that galled me, told facts that discouraged me, till I was fairly heartsick, and would have been willing to have bought her off at any price; and looked upon the advent of Félicie with a summons from madame for her, as the most blessed release that could have been.
I locked the door after her with a bursting heart, and threw myself upon the bed in an agony of crying. What would have been merely a fit of homesickness, and a loneliness soon to be conquered and forgotten with girls of a different temperament, was a longer and more lasting struggle with me. It was wholesome discipline, no doubt; but now, disheartened, I recognized no hope in all the dark horizon; saw nothing in the future that was worth living through the present for; disappointment, pain, and loneliness had taken the color out of every hope, and made what should have been morning, a night, and that of the blackest.
"Would it last?" was a question I asked myself even then, the dawning reason of the woman within me combating the passion of the child. "No, no," reason whispered; "'to mortals no Sorrow is immortal;' the storm will spend itself, and calm of some kind will come."
But the child's heart refused to be comforted, and passionately rejected reason; there was no truth in friendship, there was no kindness in any one; there was nothing but loneliness, and coldness, and cruelty in all the world.