"Where do you mean to go?" said Sarah stolidly, without taking any notice of her remark. "Because if you'll go to the village, I can get some binding I want."
"I have no intention whatever of going out for your convenience, thank you!" said Hester, laughing angrily. "I am going into the garden, and you can come or not as you please." She opened the French window as she spoke and stepped out.
"Has mamma heard from that Paris woman yet?" asked Lulu, looking after Hester, who was now standing on the lawn playing with a terrier-puppy she had lately brought home as a gift from a neighbouring farmer—much to Lady Fox-Wilton's annoyance. Hester had an absurd way of making friends with the most unsuitable people, and they generally gave her things.
"The Rector expected to hear to-day."
"I don't believe she'll go," said Lulu, beginning again on the toffy. She was a heavily made girl of twenty, with sleepy eyes and a dull complexion. She took little exercise, was inordinately fond of sweet things, helped her mother a little in the housekeeping, and was intimately acquainted with all the gossip of the village. So was Sarah; but her tongue was sharper than Lulu's, and her brain quicker. She was therefore the unpopular sister; while for Lulu her acquaintances felt rather a contemptuous indulgence. Sarah had had various love affairs, which had come to nothing, and was regarded as "disappointed" in the village. Lulu was not interested in young men, and had never yet been observed to take any trouble to capture one. So long as she was allowed sufficient sixpenny novels to read, and enough sweet things to eat, she was good-humoured enough, and could do kind things on occasion for her friends. Sarah was rarely known to do kind things; but as her woman friends were much more afraid of her than of Lulu, she was in general treated with much more consideration.
Still it could not be said that Lady Fox-Wilton was to be regarded as blessed in either of her two elder daughters. And her sons were quite frankly a trouble to her. The eldest, Sarah's junior by a year and a half, had just left Oxford suddenly and ignominiously, without a degree, and was for the most part loafing at home. The youngest, a boy of fifteen, was supposed to be delicate, and had been removed from school by his mother on that account. He too was at home, and a tutor who lodged in the village was understood to be preparing him for the Civil Service. He was a pettish and spiteful lad, and between him and Hester existed perpetual feud.
But indeed Hester was at war with each member of the family in turn; sometimes with all of them together. And it had been so from her earliest childhood. They all felt instinctively that she despised them and the slow, lethargic temperament which was in most of them an inheritance from a father cast in one of the typical moulds of British Philistinism. There was some insurmountable difference between her and them. In the first place, her beauty set her apart from the rest; and, beside her, Sarah's sharp profile, and round apple-red cheeks, or Lulu's clumsiness, made, as both girls were secretly aware, an even worse impression than they need have made. And in the next, there were in her strains of romantic, egotistic ability to which nothing in them corresponded. She could play, she could draw—brilliantly, spontaneously—up to a certain point, when neither Sarah nor Lulu could stumble through a "piece," or produce anything capable of giving the smallest satisfaction to their drawing-master. She could chatter, on occasion, so that a room full of people instinctively listened. And she had read voraciously, especially poetry, where they were content with picture-papers and the mildest of novels. Hester brought nothing to perfection; but there could be no question that in every aspect of life she was constantly making, in comparison with her family, a dashing or dazzling effect all the more striking because of the unattractive milieu out of which it sprang.
The presence of Lady Fox-Wilton, in particular, was needed to show these contrasts at their sharpest.
As Hester still raced about the lawn, with the dog, that lady came round the corner of the house, with a shawl over her head, and beckoned to the girl at play. Hester carelessly looked round.
"What do you want, mamma!"