“Who do you think was my travelling companion part of the way?” she said, when the three ladies were sitting together the first morning after her arrival. “He got in at Marley, and saw me into my train at the junction—he was going on to town. Do guess who it was—he is a friend of yours, Eugenia. Why, how stupid you both are! You are generally so quick at guessing, Gertrude.”
“I!” exclaimed Mrs Eyrecourt, looking up, as if aware for the first time that Roma had been speaking to her. “I beg your pardon, I thought you said the unknown was a friend of Eugenia’s.”
“Well, and if I did, is the world so big that by no conceivable chance two people living at opposite ends of the country could happen to have any mutual acquaintances?” said Roma. “To hear you speak, Gertrude, any one would think you had never been five miles from home. Like a nun I remember seeing when I was a child, in a convent in Switzerland, who thought, but wasn’t quite sure—the mere idea even of such an adventure seemed to overawe her—that when she was quite a little girl she had once been at Martigny, six miles from home. Why, Gertrude, I thought you prided yourself on being something of a cosmopolitan. Were you never at a place that long ago, when nobody but Miss Burney’s heroines ever went anywhere, used to be called Brighthelmstone, and did you never dine with certain friends of yours there, who never get new dresses unless they are guaranteed to be of the fashion of twenty years ago, dear old souls?”
She spoke playfully, but there was a sharpness in her raillery which Mrs Eyrecourt did not love. She could not endure being laughed at, and she felt annoyed with Roma for making fun of any of her friends, be they never so funny, all of which Roma knew, and had dealt out her words accordingly, for she had not been half an hour at home before she knew exactly how the wind blew as regarded the young wife, and she was on the alert to show Gertrude she need not look to her for sympathy in her prejudice.
But to Eugenia it was actual pain to witness the annoyance or discomfiture of another. A sort of instinct made her try to change the conversation.
“Did you say that the Swiss nun had never in her life been anywhere?” she asked Roma. “Why had she been always in a convent? I never knew children could be sent to convents except as pupils.”
“This girl was an orphan, and she had some money, and she had come to look on the convent as her home,” said Roma; “she wasn’t quite a lady; her father had been a rich farmer. I daresay she was happy enough, but it made a great impression on me as a child. It seemed so dreadful to be shut in between those four high walls when the world outside was so beautiful. I shouldn’t have pitied her half so much if the convent had been in an ugly place.”
“I don’t know,” said Eugenia, with a dreamy look in her eyes; “I think it would be something to have the sky and mountains to look out at if one were miserable.”
The expression of her face struck Roma with a slight pain. It was not thus she had looked on her wedding-day, even when blinded with the tears of her farewell. Through those tears Roma had been able to pronounce her “perfectly happy.”
“Is it Gertrude’s fault, I wonder,” thought Roma, with quick indignation, “or can she be stirring already in her slumber? And only six weeks married.”