“I don’t,” Betty replied. “I like our own poor people far better. But Frances and Eira—and Madeleine too—have taken to rushing off here this winter, as often as they can get; once or twice a week sometimes.”
“What for?” asked Miss Charlemont. “Sketching? I don’t mean out of doors, of course, but the people themselves?” and as, at that moment, a woman passing along the road—a young and handsome woman—looked up with a smile and a half-graceful, half-bashful gesture of greeting, she added, glancing at her, “Is she a model of yours?”
Frances and Eira smiled.
“Oh no,” said the latter, “we are not half as accomplished as you think us. It is for something quite different that we come. And but for Madeleine we should never have been able to do it at all.”
Eira and Gertrude were now walking together; Horace and Betty behind them. Madeleine, who was just in front, caught Eira’s words, and looked back with a smile of deprecation.
“Don’t praise me so undeservedly,” she said. “I assure you, Gertrude, it is all their doing. I have only helped in the smallest way. I don’t see how I could possibly have done less.”
“Tell me about it,” said Gertrude to her companion; and Eira, by no means unwillingly, gave her a rapid little sketch of their “plan” for helping and instructing the poor, neglected fisher-folk of this outlying little village.
Gertrude listened with interest, the greater perhaps for the impression made upon her by the uncommon aspect of her surroundings.
“So you see,” Eira concluded, with her usual frankness, “we couldn’t possibly have managed it without Madeleine’s help, though Mrs Ramsay’s money did come in for the first start. Madeleine has given us, I know, all she possibly could, out of her own money.”
“But she has plenty,” said Gertrude, though with no wish to decry one for whom her admiration was unbounded.