Chapter Four.
All My Own Fault.
“What are you in such a brown study about, Connie?” asked mamma at breakfast the next morning.
I started.
“Nothing very particular,” I said, and I felt myself get red. I should not have liked mamma to know my thoughts—I was rehearsing for the hundredth time the scene of my first meeting with the Whytes, or rather, I should say, of their first meeting me. Just as mamma spoke I was wondering how I could persuade papa to let me ride over with him before mamma paid her more formal call at the Yew Trees.
Mamma smiled but did not press for an answer.
“I must go and order dinner,” she said, rising from her seat rather wearily. Papa had already gone out. “How nice it will be when you are grown up, my Sweet Content, and able to help me with the housekeeping.”
“Oh dear, I hope you will have a housekeeper when you get tired of it,” I said. “You never need count upon me for anything to do with eating and cooking, mamma. I should hate ordering dinners and looking over the butcher’s and grocer’s books. You wouldn’t like to see me a second Anna Gale, I hope?”
“No, indeed, dear; that you never could be. Poor Anna has no brains, and she is so very dowdy—though, perhaps that sounds unkind, for she is a very good girl,” and mamma looked rather shocked at herself.
“But one may be good without being quite so dull and ‘dowdy,’” I said, coaxingly.