“It’s very kind of her,” said Ella sleepily, with again the return upon herself as to her judgment of her sister. Suddenly a new idea struck her. “Hester,” she said, “what sort of person is Sir Philip Cheynes? Is he nice, or is he conceited and stuck-up, and—flirting, you know—that sort of a man?”
“Bless you, no, Miss Ella, not as ever I’ve heard tell. What’s put such a notion in your head? If he was stuck-up, he’d not be so to his own cousins; and he does think all the world of them, that he does. And as for being a flirting gentleman, he’d be uncommon clever to get Miss Maddie or Miss Ermie to join in such like nonsense, though by what I hear sometimes, young ladies—and young ladies who think a deal of themselves too—is not so partickler as they might be, now a days. I don’t hold with that tennis-playing, Miss Ella, and all that sort of apeing gentlemen, as seems the fashion.”
Ella laughed.
“Tennis is very dull, I think. I shouldn’t like to spend several hours a day at it,” she said.
“Sir Philip is evidently a prig of the first water,” she decided mentally. “But if so, he’s not likely to admire me, so why do they want to keep me out of his way, as I see they do? And they have got god mother to join them in it for some reason.”
Ella’s inward indignation sent her down stairs to breakfast in anything but a genial mood. And, as her moods were very apt to do, it found its expression in her outer woman.
“You do look so grim, Ella,” said Ermine. “I am so tired of that linsey-woolsey frock of yours—couldn’t you put a bit of scarlet about yourself somewhere? Even a red tucker would be an improvement.”
Madelene glanced at her younger sister as Ermine spoke.
“You might wear your sailor serge every morning now, I think, Ella,” she said. “That frock is getting shabby and it is a dingy shade. You remember we couldn’t get the grey we wanted. About Christmas time too, one likes to see people looking bright.”
Ella surveyed her garments with a half indifferent air that was rather irritating.