“Are you tired of your honours already, Mary?” she said. “Well, who knows!”
“I didn’t mea—” began Mary, flushing slightly, “besides, it has always been settled that I was the old maid of the family.”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs Greville. “That reminds me, you will find some old friends at Bournemouth—the Morpeths; you don’t know, Mary, what an impression you made on Vance Morpeth.”
Mary looked annoyed. “That boy!” she exclaimed, hastily, “my dear Mrs Greville—”
“He isn’t a boy—he is five-and-twenty,” interrupted Mrs Greville, slightly ruffled. “Of course I don’t mean to say that now, with your present prospects you might not be justified in—well, to use a common phrase, though not a very refined one, in ‘looking higher’.”
“Dear Mrs Greville!” exclaimed both Mary and her mother together. “Don’t say things like that, please,” Mary went on. “You don’t really think that I would be influenced by that kind of consideration?—you don’t think so poorly of me?”
“No, my dear, I do not. I think you and all of you a great deal too unworldly; I wish, for your own sakes, you were a little more influenced by considerations of that kind,” said Mrs Greville, nodding her head sagaciously, and just then, some one calling Mrs Western from the room, she went on in a lower voice, “Why are you so desperately cold to Mr Cheviott, my dear? Do you really dislike him so hopelessly?”
“Who said I disliked him?” exclaimed Mary, sharply, and the slight extra colour on her cheeks deepened now into hot, angry crimson.
“My dear! Don’t be so fierce. Surely you can’t have forgotten all the things you yourself said against him. Why, you would not even go to see through Romary till I coaxed you into it—just because it was his house. I assure you your aversion to him became quite a joke among us—Vance Morpeth always speaks of him as your bête noire.”
Mary was silent. What else could she be?