“It will spoil it all,” said Philip at length after a silence which had lasted some moments, “spoil it all completely.”
“What?” asked Madelene, looking up, though her fingers still went on busily weaving the soft snowy fleece on her lap.
“Everything, of course. Our nice settled ways—this satisfactory sort of life together, knowing each other so well that we never have misunderstandings or upsets or—or bothers. Your father and my grandmother are a model aunt and nephew to begin with, and as for us three—why the world never before saw such a perfection of cousinship! And into the midst of this delightful state of things, this pleasant little society where each of us can pursue his or her special avocation and—and perform his or her special duties—for we’re not selfish people, my dears—I’m not going to allow that—into the midst of it you fling helter-skelter, a spoilt, ill-tempered, restless unmanageable school-girl—eager for amusement and impatient of control—incapable of understanding us or the things we care for. I never could have imagined anything more undesirable—I—”
“Upon my word, Philip, I had no idea you could be so eloquent,” interrupted Ermine. “But it is eloquence thrown away, unless you want to prove that you yourself, if not we, are the very thing you have been denying, without having been accused of it.”
“Selfishness—eh?” said Philip.
“Of course, or something very like it.”
Philip was silent. To judge by his next remark Ermine’s reproof had not touched him much.
“I don’t know that, for some time to come at least,” he said, “it will matter much to me. I shall probably be very little here till Christmas and then only for a few weeks.”
His cousins looked up in some surprise.
“Indeed,” they said. “Where are you going? Abroad again?”—“You will miss all the hunting and shooting,” Ermine added.