“It was very nice,” I said. “But, they’re not a bit like what I thought they would be, mamma. You know—when we heard they were so poor—”
“But they are poor,” she replied, “and I’m sure they are not—they would not set themselves up in any disagreeable way. They seem so well-bred.”
“Ye-es,” I said. “They’re—oh I think they are just everything they should be, whether they’re poor or not. They’re much cleverer than me, mamma. They’ve learnt so many things I haven’t, and seen so much more—they go to London every year—and—”
My depressed, discontented tone must have hurt and troubled mamma, for she answered indignantly:
“It is very wrong and unkind of them—of that girl,” she said, “to boast and show off to you, darling. You are too sensitive. I am quite sure they are not cleverer than my Connie, and as for looks— You shall not see any more of them, dear. It would be quite new indeed for my Sweet Content to be made discontented. I am disappointed in Evey Whyte. I was sure she was so nice.”
There was a hot, red spot on each of poor mamma’s cheeks; this state of things was not at all what I had bargained for. I had only wanted to work off my own dissatisfaction, which was partly jealousy, but partly too, I hope, a less unworthy feeling, by grumbling and by trying to put blame on those who had had the care of me. I was punished.
“Oh no, no, mamma dear,” I said eagerly. “Evey’s not like that. She’s not the least atom boasting; it was more—things I noticed and asked about, myself. It’s not only that she’s clever—you should hear how she can play the organ; but I daresay you’d let me learn it too, if I liked—it’s—it’s partly, mamma, that I can feel she’s so much more useful, and—and unselfish than I am. I can see it quite well; she does such a lot to help her mother and them all.”
And, greatly to mamma’s surprise and distress, I leaned my head down on her lap and burst into tears.
How she consoled and petted me! How she assured me I was everything to her; the very light of her eyes; her comfort, her blessing—that she could not wish me any different from what I was, and ever so much more in the same strain. It was very sweet, and to a certain extent soothing, but in the end it only deepened the impression. For it made me feel how utterly unselfish and self-forgetting mamma was, above all wherever I was concerned, and it made me feel, too, how little I deserved such devotion. Then the thought of her cruel trials came over me as it had never done before—how often I had grudged my sympathy to her? Even if she were almost weakly and foolishly indulgent to me, she was scarcely to be blamed. Instead of taking advantage of it and treating her fondness with something very like contempt, as I had often done, would not the right way be to try my best to be more worthy of it? I don’t know what put the thought into my head just then. I had a queer feeling that if I had been talking it all over with Yvonne, it was what she would have said, for it had struck me once or twice that in her way of speaking to and of mamma there had been a special sort of tenderness, almost reverence, as if she had heard her sad story, and I remembered the anxious, half-reproachful way she had glanced at me when I seemed so indifferent about mamma’s walking home alone. Yes; I felt and knew that the sudden thought was one Evey would have approved of, and I grew calmer. I wiped my eyes and kissed mamma as I had seldom done before: a new kind of strength seemed to come into me, and I resolved that from that moment I would care for her in quite a new way.
