“I don’t think so,” answered Horace, “he only seemed extremely surprised. What do you think, Miss Morion?” turning to Frances. “You don’t anticipate any real difficulty, I trust?”
“No,” said Frances, with a smile. “I think it will be all right. But we must have a little time to get used to the idea. I suppose fathers always feel a certain shock when they have to face the thought of parting with a daughter.” Her words dispelled the slight misgiving, and Horace’s spirits rose again, and so, as a matter of course, did Betty’s. Eira’s were already bubbling over, and soon, very soon, the merriest of laughter might have been heard through the open windows of the drawing-room, had Lady Emma and her husband not been too preoccupied to notice it.
To say that the mother was less astonished than had been Betty’s father would still leave a wide margin for surprise on her part. For Mr Morion’s state of mind far exceeded that of even extreme astonishment. He was amazed, unable even now to take in as a fact that Betty, insignificant little Betty, as he had been rather in the habit of considering her, could have become a person of sufficient consequence to attract the notice—nay, more than notice, the admiration—of an intelligent man, whom he had honoured with his own friendly regard, and he blurted out the news with an abruptness and almost incoherence enough to have startled any one less calm and in some ways phlegmatic than his wife.
“Mr Littlewood,” she repeated, “Mr Littlewood has proposed for Betty? Betty! you are sure it is she—not, not Fr—?” Here some unexplained instinct made her stop short.
“Betty, of course it is Betty,” was the reply. “Though I confess I am not a little astonished. A child—an undeveloped child—and he, a man of the world and of very fair average intellect. What is he thinking of?”
“You didn’t speak in that way to him, I hope,” said Lady Emma. “It seems to me natural enough—he has fallen in love with her—and to my mind has shown his good taste in doing so. She is not a showy girl, I allow, but eminently refined and sweet-looking. And you forget that she is twenty-four. A very suitable age. And except that she has no money, I, her mother, consider her a prize worth winning.”
“Ah, well,” said Mr Morion, in a more conciliatory tone, for the rarity of the occasions on which his wife “spoke out” to him made them the more impressive. “Ah, well, I was taken aback, I suppose. You forget the wretched state of my nerves. And—my being utterly unprepared for anything of the kind. But you needn’t be uneasy. I shall doubtless get over it in a day or two.”
For once the mother in Lady Emma asserted itself more strongly than the wife.
“I have no doubt you will,” she said, with a touch of irony which, even if her husband had perceived, he could not have believed in. “But I am, if not uneasy, at least anxious to learn more. Naturally so—for Betty’s sake. Is all satisfactory? His position and prospects? And his mother’s approval?”
At this Mr Morion began to feel and look rather small.