“Yes,” she said, “they accept. Not that I had much doubt of it. Pretty handwriting,” she went on. “I wonder how those girls got educated?” Her daughter’s face grew rather red.
“They are very well educated,” she said. “Frances undoubtedly is, and she is naturally the cleverest. Whatever the other two are, and they would certainly pass muster to say the least, they owe greatly to her. She is a model elder sister.”
“She would be a model in any relation of life, it seems to me,” said Horace, for the slight irritation which his mother’s tone had caused his sister was not unshared by him.
Mrs Littlewood’s underlying, though usually well-controlled spirit of perversity, here slightly got the better of her.
“For my part,” she said, “I confess to being very much more attracted by the younger sister. I don’t mean Eira—what a fantastic name!—she is too much of a hoyden still to please me, but by that dark-eyed Betty. There is something quite unique about her.”
Madeleine said nothing, but glanced at her brother with a certain anxiety.
“Horace is by no means a diplomatist,” she thought to herself, “if what I more than half suspect is the case,” for her glance revealed to her a slight deepening of colour through the sunburn of his face. “He is annoyed,” she went on in her own mind, “but he should not show it.” And anxious to change the subject to some extent, and at the same time to please her mother, she turned towards Mrs Littlewood quickly.
“Yes,” she said, “Betty has something very uncommon about her. I should like to see her in the evening. I wonder how she ‘lights up.’”
Her success was greater than she had expected, greater than she had dreamed of, for though her mother’s next words contained a suggestion in every way congenial to Madeleine, it was one she would never herself have ventured upon making.
“I don’t see why she should not give you an opportunity of satisfying your curiosity,” said Mrs Littlewood pleasantly. “Supposing we ask the two younger girls to come in after dinner? Gertrude Charlemont would make friends with them—she must be about the same age.” Gertrude Charlemont was only eighteen or nineteen at most, as Madeleine knew. But she did not correct her mother’s impression as to Betty or Eira’s age. “She is all the more likely to judge them leniently if she thinks of them as so young,” said the Morion sisters’ warmhearted champion to herself, with some pardonable calculation, as she turned to her mother and replied quietly—Madeleine was always afraid of laying herself open to any charge of “gushing” or exaggeration—