“I know, that is what makes me notice it the more. One expects to see change at your age after an interval of a year or two—I counted you scarcely grown-up when you came to us last year. But in six months! No, I can’t quite make it out.”
“What is it?” said Philippa, lightly. “Am I fatter, or thinner, or paler, or what?”
Miss Lermont looked at her scrutinisingly, which did not tend to increase the young girl’s composure.
“No,” said the elder woman at last, “it is not in that sort of way so much—though you are thinner, rather thinner, and perhaps a little paler. Nevertheless you have grown still—prettier,” checking herself in the use of a more imposing adjective. “I am not afraid of telling you so, as I know you are not the least conceited. But you have changed otherwise. You are not quite as bright and self-reliant as you were—you look anxious every now and then, and sometimes you are rather absent. Tell me, my dear child, have you fallen in love with any one?”
It was the greatest relief to Philippa that Maida’s kindly cross-questioning should have turned in this direction. For even if she herself had thought it well to take Miss Lermont into her confidence as to her adventures, she was not free to do so, Mrs Raynsworth having bound her down to tell no one the story without first consulting herself. The laugh, therefore, with which the young girl prefaced her reply was quite natural and unconstrained.
“No indeed,” she said, “I can’t fancy myself falling in love with any one unless I were very sure that the person in question had first fallen very thoroughly in love with me. And—I can scarcely picture such a state of things as that.”
“Naturally,” said Miss Lermont. “I don’t think any girl—not a girl such as you are, at least, dear Philippa—can picture it till it comes to pass.”
Philippa hesitated.
“I mean more than that,” she said. “I do not feel as if I were the sort of girl a man is likely to care for in that way. I am not—oh, not yielding, and appealing, and all that sort of thing. There is something of a boy about me. Long ago, when I was a tiny girl, the nurses used to tell me I had no ‘pretty ways.’” Maida could not help smiling at Philippa’s self-deprecation. But as the girl looked down at her—Miss Lermont was by this time established in her invalid-chair, her cousin standing beside her—with a certain wistfulness in her expression, it struck the elder woman still more strongly that Philippa was changed, softened and somewhat saddened. Her present estimate of herself was far less correct now than a few months ago. “You forget,” Maida replied, “that tastes differ as to human beings’ attraction for each other, luckily for the peace of society, more widely than in any other direction. It is not every man, by any means, whose ideal woman is of the type which you evidently think the most winning. But all the same, my dear child, you are much more—‘womanly,’ shall I say?—less self-confident and gentler than you were at Dorriford. Something has changed you. Don’t you feel conscious of it yourself?”
“Growing older perhaps,” said Philippa, trying to speak lightly. But it was impossible for her to be anything but genuine with Maida. “No,” she continued, with a sudden alteration of voice, “I will not talk nonsense. I know that I have changed; you are very quick and discriminating to have found it out, and I wish I could tell you all about it. But I cannot, not at present at any rate. So don’t let us talk any more about it. I do want to enjoy this delightful place and weather and you to the very utmost.”