“Not to go to the ball,” Ermine replied. “But I fancy they will want us to stay for a day or two. You see Mrs Belvoir says she will come over to make further arrangements. And three would be too many to go to stay. But Maddie, I—”
“No. I know what you’re going to say, and you’re not to say it,” Madelene interrupted. “You are not to be the one to stay at home. You’re ever so much younger than I—”
“One year, eleven months and a day,” said Ermine. “Twenty years—a hundred would come nearer it,” said Madelene. “I was born old and circumstances have not rejuvenated me. No—if we can get papa to agree to let Ella go, I shall stay at home. It stands to reason. I am getting to an age when I should not be expected to go on dancing.”
“Ah, well—we needn’t quarrel about it yet,” said Ermine lightly. “I am only afraid the occasion will not arise, and that papa will be inexorable. There was something far from propitious in the accent he put on that ‘out’ this morning.”
She was right; inexorable he proved. Yet the sisters went about it diplomatically enough. They said very little at first, and were careful not to fret the thing into a sore from the start, as is so often done, and for a day or two they congratulated themselves that their gently suggested arguments had carried weight. But when the following week Mrs Belvoir wrote to say she was driving over to settle about the day they would come, and how many nights they would stay, and to discuss the whole programme—then the bolt fell.
“Ella go? No, most certainly not,” said Colonel St Quentin. “I never thought of such a thing. I hope you haven’t been putting anything of the kind into her head?”
“We have not mentioned it to her since the morning when the first note came,” said Madelene. “That morning unluckily I spoke of it before her.”
“Why should you say ‘unluckily’? It is absurd to treat her in that way,” said her father. “There should be and there must be no question raised, in the faintest way even, of anything of the kind for her. She is not yet eighteen—why, Ermine never went out at all till she was nineteen—”
“That was unusual however papa,” Miss St Quentin ventured to say.
“Well, what can be more unusual than Ella’s case? It calls for unusual treatment certainly. She has been most injudiciously brought up, I see it more and more clearly. A life of dependence—dependence on her own exertions not improbably—”