“It is unlucky,” she thought, “that I should have gone out this afternoon, for I don’t want mamma to be prejudiced against these Morions, for the daughters’ sakes. Who could have thought of them calling on such a threatening day? I must do my best.” And without further delay she passed through the larger drawing-room into the smaller one, where her mother usually sat.
It was not till long afterwards—an “afterwards” bringing with it relations which allowed the tragic element to melt into the comic, on looking back to that afternoon’s history—that Madeleine fully knew the relief her appearance brought with it to the very unhappy-looking group in the boudoir.
“You came in like a ray of sunshine or a breath of fresh, sweet air,” she was told in that hereafter-to-come “afterwards.”
She meant to do her best, and she did it, and she was not one to do such things by halves. As far as “good-will” went Frances Morion was certainly not behind her; but then Frances was at a disadvantage from her want of social experience—more at a disadvantage than the quiet calm of her manner might have led one to suppose, as this only made her appear somewhat impassive and phlegmatic. Madeleine, on the contrary, forearmed by a certain amount of knowledge of the ground, discarded for once the self-containedness which was usual to her, and which she had learned to adopt as a cloak for her real impulsiveness. Nothing could have been easier, kindlier, more girlish even, without a touch of self-assertion, than her greeting of the three strangers—Lady Emma stiffly established on one end of her hostess’ sofa, her eldest daughter a chair or two off, cudgelling her brains for some observations which might possibly draw forth a spark of kin-making “nature” in the direction of sympathy from Mrs Littlewood; Betty seated at a much greater distance, dreamily gazing out into the wintry garden, apparently indifferent, in reality throbbing with disappointment for Frances’ sake at “Mr Littlewood’s” non-appearance, and at the well-bred unapproachableness of the two seniors of the party.
She had begged to be allowed to come, and Lady Emma had given in, little suspecting the girl’s real motive of hoping, by some innocent tact and diplomacy, to help the position, perhaps to “throw them together,” as Eira expressed it, seeing that it was almost a case of “three being no company.”
“For mamma and Mrs Littlewood are sure to talk,” said Eira, “and then Miss Littlewood would absorb Frances, and Frances in her usual dreadfully unselfish way would think herself bound to talk only to her, and he would feel himself snubbed very likely.”
And, alas! “mamma and Mrs Littlewood” found nothing to say; and for once even Frances seemed discomfited, and no “he” appeared, and his sister evidently did not want to make friends. For her mother forgot to mention—or refrained from doing so—that Madeleine was out.
Altogether it was a terrible fiasco, and Betty’s one great longing was to get out, and rush home, and burst into tears in the arms of the sympathetic Eira, when—the door opened, and, with it, light and life and “sugar and spice and all things nice” seemed almost immediately to pervade the atmosphere.
Madeleine’s first greeting—to Lady Emma, of course—had just that touch of deference which gratified the elder woman. Mrs Littlewood, who, to give her her due, was feeling far more conscious of being bored and stupid herself—for to tell the truth she had been more than half asleep when the visitors were announced—than of any positive irritation at them, gave an inaudible sigh of relief. Frances, when the newcomer turned to her with something in her eyes which said tacitly, “I hope you will like me, I mean to like you,” was won on the spot. Only Betty’s half-childish gravity, her big dark eyes fixing themselves on Madeleine with dubious inquiry—only Betty struck Madeleine as somewhat baffling and unresponsive. The thought darted quickly through her mind:
“I wonder if this is the youngest of the or the middle one, whom Horace spoke of as a ‘changeable sort of girl not easy to understand.’ I fancy she must be that one. She is pretty, very pretty, but the other one is almost beautiful.”