“It is difficult,” Philippa agreed, “but your having no maid still seems to me the worst of it. Its hateful to depend on a housemaid’s good offices, and even morning-dresses are so difficult to manage by one’s self nowadays.”
“Yes indeed,” said Evelyn; “I shall never know if I look nice or not; it isn’t as if they were people I knew well—or knew at all. Oh, dear me, how I wish they had waited to ask me till Duke came home! But now you must help me to decide on one of these patterns, or I shall miss the post.”
The next half-hour passed quickly in discussions of the details of her sister’s trousseau, as Philippa laughingly called it; and if the younger girl in her secret heart found the minutiae rather wearisome, she kept her feelings to herself, and was more than rewarded by Evelyn’s increased good spirits and cheerfulness.
“You don’t know what a comfort it is to have Philippa back again,” she said to her mother that evening at dinner; “I am beginning to feel ever so much happier about Wyverston. I shall be able to write quite comfortably to poor old Duke by next mail.”
Mrs Raynsworth glanced affectionately at her younger daughter. Personally these two resembled each other very closely, nor did the resemblance stop with their outward appearance. There was decision and firmness in both faces, both even more strongly marked in Philippa’s case than in her mother’s, for young as the girl still was, she gave one an impression of extreme reliability, and of late years somewhat failing health and the mellowing influence of time had softened the character of Mrs Raynsworth’s whole personality. Her married life, though far from an unhappy one, had been by no means free from the undue share of practical cares which almost inevitably falls to the wife of a scholar. And that Mr Raynsworth was a scholar, in the fullest sense of the word, there could be no two opinions. It was from him Philippa inherited the intellectual side of her character, balanced by her mother’s practical good sense, and other more ordinary though not the less desirable feminine qualities.
In his secret heart there were times when Mr Raynsworth sighed over the girl’s eager interest in social amusements and the daily life of those about her.
“She almost has it in her to be a really learned woman,” he would say to himself, and in other surroundings it is possible that his ideal for her might have been realised. But as things were, Philippa would have choked in a study had the bulk of her time been spent poring over books. Her lessons with her father over, or, in later years, the work she did for him, and that with real appreciation, completed for the time being, she would fly off to arrange flowers in the drawing-room, or even to discuss the fashion of a new dress, with as keen enjoyment as if she had never touched a Greek or Latin book in her life.
Personally she was like her mother. Dark-haired, brown-eyed, and of a make and bearing suggestive of unusual vigour; while by one of those curious inconsistencies which abound in family likenesses, Evelyn Headfort resembled her father in appearance and temperament, and though by careful education her brain-powers had been made the most of, they were not above the average.
One gift she possessed—the source of infinite pleasure to those about her—that of a very beautiful voice, and if Philippa’s generous nature had been capable of even a passing touch of jealousy of her sister, it would have shown in this direction.
“It is strange,” she would say, sometimes, “that one can adore music as I feel I do, and yet have no power of expressing it one’s self.”