“I don’t fancy somehow that Lady Mildred Osbert is one of the best rich people. Is she, papa? You don’t speak as if you liked her very much?”
“I don’t think one is justified in either liking or disliking ‘very much’ any person whom one scarcely knows,” Mr Waldron replied. “I have told you that I believe she does kind things. I believe she has done one lately. But if you ask me if I think—she is an old woman now—she is the sort of woman your mother would have been in the same circumstances, well no—certainly I don’t.”
And Mr Waldron laughed, a happy genial little laugh this time.
“That’s hardly fair upon Lady Mildred, papa,” said Jerry. “We all know that there never could be any woman as good as mamma.”
“My dear boy, what would mamma say if she heard you?”
“Oh, she’d quote some proverb about people thinking their own geese swans, or something like that, of course,” said Jerry unmoved. “That’s because she’s so truly modest. And if she wasn’t truly modest she wouldn’t be so good, and then—and then—she wouldn’t be herself. But I agree with you, papa,” he went on in his funny, old-fashioned way, “it is a good thing mamma isn’t rich. She’d worry—my goodness, wouldn’t she just!—she’d worry herself and all of us to death for fear she wasn’t doing enough for other people.”
“That would certainly not be charity beginning at home, eh, Jerry?” said his father, laughing outright this time.
“Papa,” said Charlotte, “what is the kind thing Lady Mildred has done lately? Is it about—the girl?”
“What girl?—what do you know about it?” said Mr Waldron, rather sharply.
But Charlotte was not easily disconcerted, especially when very much in earnest.