“It is two years ago,” said Philippa. “Two years may alter one a good deal—even less time than that—for I recollect your saying at Cannes, within six months of the time I was here, that I had changed.”
“I remember it, too,” said her cousin. “But now I should express it differently. At Cannes you were changing; you seemed unsettled and uncertain, though in some ways matured, and—do not be hurt at the word—softened. But now you are changed, the process is completed.”
“I hope for the better?” inquired Philippa. She spoke lightly, but there was an undercurrent of earnestness in her words, too.
“To my mind, if it is not impertinent of me to give my opinion,” said Maida, gently, “very certainly yes. You are just what I pictured you would be as a full-grown woman, though—”
“Don’t stop short. I like to know all you feel about me. It does me good.”
“I was going to say I scarcely saw how anything but the discipline of sorrow could make you quite what I wanted you to be, my darling,” Miss Lermont replied. And the unwonted expression of affection touched Philippa. “And I trembled at the thought. I am cowardly about suffering for those I love. Yet how short-sighted we are! Here you are, with all the softening, and mellowing, and widening I hoped for, done—and yet—no special suffering has, so far as I know, fallen to your share. Don’t think me inquisitive,” she added, hastily. “I don’t want you to tell me anything you would rather not.”
Philippa hesitated.
“I have often thought of telling you the whole history of my life during the six or eight months after I was last here,” she said. “All my experiences—my personal experiences, I mean—seemed compressed into that time. Since then things have gone on very monotonously, though I have not been either dull or unhappy. You see it was so clear to me that it was my duty to stay at home and help papa again, after Charley so unexpectedly got that splendid piece of work in India. And with Evelyn settled at home so comfortably and no anxiety about her, things just settled down somehow. These last eighteen months have been most uneventful.”
“You might have varied them by a little visit to us,” said Maida.
“Truly I could not,” Philippa replied, earnestly. “The one time I could have come, you remember Mrs Lermont was ill and you were fully engaged. I have only been to Palden once—that was last winter—for ten days.”