“How do you mean?” said her mother. “I should say she will get on very well, and meet troubles pretty philosophically when they come. She is not spoilt, and there is nothing fantastic or in the least morbid about her.”
“N-no,” Miss Lermont agreed. “But she is more inexperienced than she thinks, and though not spoilt in the ordinary sense of the word, she has not really had much to try her. And her nature is deeper than you would think—deeper than she knows herself.”
“Possibly so,” Mrs Lermont replied. “But though you are certainly not morbid, Maida, I think you are a trifle fantastic—about other people, never about yourself. You study them so, and I think you put your own ideas into your pictures of them. Now I should say that Philippa Raynsworth is just the sort of girl to go through life in a comfortable—and by that I don’t mean selfish—satisfactory sort of way, without anything much out of the commonplace. She has plenty of energy, and, above all, any amount of common-sense.” Maida laughed. This sort of discussion was not very uncommon between the mother and daughter; they were much together, owing to Mrs Lermont’s increasing lameness and Maida’s chronic delicacy, and often alone. And they understood each other well, though in many ways they were very different.
“Perhaps you are right, mother,” the daughter said, “Perhaps I do work up people in my imagination till they grow quite unlike what they really are. People, some especially, interest me so,” she went on, thoughtfully. “I feel very grateful to my fellow-creatures; thinking them over helps to make my life much pleasanter than it might otherwise be.”
Mrs Lermont glanced at her half anxiously. It was so seldom that Maida alluded to the restrictions and deprivations of her lot.
“I am sure, dear, you always think of them in the kindest possible way; you may be critical, but you are certainly not cynical,” and she glanced at her daughter affectionately. Mrs Lermont was an affectionate mother to all her children, but her daughter Maida had the power of drawing out a strain of tenderness of which one would scarcely have suspected the existence in her. Miss Lermont smiled back.
“I am glad you think so, mother,” she said; “all the same, I often feel I should be on my guard lest the interest of dissecting others’ characters should lead me too far. As for Philippa, I shall be only too glad, poor child, if her life is a happy and uncomplicated one.” And the subject for the time was dropped, though Maida’s memory, above all where her affections were concerned, was curiously retentive. From that time her young cousin had her own place in what Maida sometimes to herself called her invisible picture-gallery; there were many touches still wanting to the completion of the portrait, some which no one could have predicted.
Philippa herself, tranquilly seated in the corner of her second-class railway compartment, would have been not a little astonished could she have overheard what her cousins were saying about her—herself was not, as a rule, the subject of her cogitations.
It was a long journey to Marlby, the nearest station to Philippa’s home; long, comparatively speaking, that is to say, for the length of journeys, like the measure of many other things, is but a relative matter, and the young girl had travelled so little in her short life that the eight hours across country seemed to her no trifling matter. She enjoyed it thoroughly; even the waitings at junctions and changing of trains, at which many would have murmured, added to the pleasurable excitement of the whole. There was something exhilarating in the mere fact of passing through places whose names were unfamiliar to her.
“What a pretty name!” she said to herself, at one station where some minutes had to be spent for no apparent reason, as nobody got out or got in, and neither express nor luggage train passing by solved the enigma—”‘Merle-in-the-Wold!’ and what a pretty country it seems about here! I don’t remember noticing it on my way coming. I wonder how long it will be before I pass by here again. They won’t be so afraid about me at home after this, when they see how well I have managed—catching trains and everything quite rightly, and not losing my luggage, or anything stupid like that—though, I suppose, I’d better not shout till I’m out of the wood. I should feel rather small if my things don’t turn up at Marlby.”