To her surprise, Betty faced round upon her with some indignation.
“I don’t see that at all,” she replied. “I am tired of being treated like a baby. I am fit for much more than you think. But I am not going to talk about possibilities any more. We have done so too much, and—and I think it is rather indelicate.”
“You are very unkind,” said poor Eira, looking more than half ready to cry, “and from now I vow that I shall pay you out in your own coin. You may try as you like, but you won’t get me to talk about it or him any more, and I won’t tell you anything I get to know.”
“Very glad to hear it,” said Betty, though in her heart she already wished that she had not snubbed Eira quite so fiercely, for the younger girl had opportunities of judging and remarking the drift of events, as Betty herself, in some ways increasingly self-conscious and less of an outsider than she would have liked to own, was unable to do. Eira, hurt feelings notwithstanding, was not slow to find consolation even in Betty’s unwonted petulance.
“She really thinks it’s serious, and she is beginning to feel unhappy at the thought of Frances leaving us,” thought Eira. “I am not even sure but that Mr Littlewood has said something about it to Betty, and that she is desperately afraid of breaking his confidence. She has a funny look sometimes when he is with us—half-frightened, as if she wanted to get away. Perhaps,” reflectively, “it has to do with his going back to India.” For that such a possibility was in question, words let fall by Horace himself, and by his sister, had made no secret of.
On the whole, just at this time the domestic atmosphere of the big house was more genial than that of the little one, despite the improvement in Lady Emma’s husband. For one thing Mrs Littlewood laid herself out to be agreeable to the elder Mr Morion, and declared to Ryder—not a little, strange to say, considering how recently his own attitude to his cousins had been one of slightly resentful indifference, not a little to the younger man’s gratification—that she had no idea “the old bear” could have proved so well worth knowing.
“He is really quite interesting, once you start him on subjects he is well up in,” she said, “so long as you can keep him from the terrible topic of his ailments. And my admiration for Lady Emma increases daily: she is really a saint of unselfishness, quite beaming with pleasure if she thinks her husband is enjoying himself.”
“It is very good of you,” was the reply, “to draw out the best of them in this way; as you must know there are very few people who could have done it with your perfect tact.”
“Tact,” she replied, “in spite of the fashion of exalting it into a positive virtue, is to my mind a mere question of ‘knack.’ Superficial tact, at least, which often serves the purpose as well as or better than anything deeper!”
“You do yourself injustice,” said Ryder. “I don’t believe your tact has no more sturdy root.”