Frances turned her eyes to her sister’s face with something like reproach. “I may not have used the right word. I have never spoken on such subjects before.”
“I have always been told that men are dreadful prudes,” said Constance. “I suppose papa has brought you up to think that such things must never be spoken of. I’ll tell you what is original about it. I have been asked if he was not rich enough, if he was not handsome enough, if it was because he had no title: and I have been asked if I loved him, which was nonsense. I could answer all that; but you I can’t answer. Don’t I like him? I was not going to be persecuted about him. It was Markham who put this into my head. ‘Why don’t you go to your father,’ he said, ‘if you won’t hear reason? He is just the sort of person to understand you, if we don’t.’ So, then, I took them at their word. I came off—to papa.”
“Does Markham dislike papa? I mean, doesn’t he think——”
“I know what you mean. They don’t think that papa has good sense. They think him romantic, and all that. I have always been accustomed to think so too. But the curious thing is that he isn’t,” said Constance, with an injured air. “I suppose, however foolish one’s father may be for himself, he still feels that he must stand on the parents’ side.”
“You speak,” said Frances, with a little indignation, “as if papa was likely to be against—his children; as if he were an enemy.”
“Taking sides is not exactly being enemies,” said Constance. “We are each of our own faction, you know. It is like Whigs and Tories. The fathers and mothers side with each other, even though they may be quite different and not get on together. There is a kind of reason in it. Only, I have always heard so much of papa as unreasonable and unlike other people, that I never thought of him in that light. He would be just the same, though, except that for the present I am a stranger, and he feels bound to be civil to me. If it were not for his politeness, he is capable of being medieval too.”
“I don’t know what medieval means,” said Frances, with much heat, indignant to hear her father thus spoken of as a subject for criticism. Perhaps she had criticised him in her time, as children use—but silently, not putting it into words, which makes a great difference. And besides, what one does one’s self in this way is quite another matter. As she looked at this girl, who was a stranger, though in some extraordinary way not a stranger, a momentary pang and impotent sudden rage against the web of strange circumstances in which she felt herself caught and bewildered, flamed up in her mild eyes and mind, unaccustomed to complications. Constance took no notice of this sudden passion.
“It means bread and water,” she said, with a laugh, “and shutting up in one’s own room, and cutting off of all communication from without. Mamma, if she were driven to it, is quite capable of that. They all are—rather than give in; but as we are not living in the middle ages, they have to give in at last. Perhaps, if I had thought that what you may call his official character would be too strong for papa, I should have fought it out at home. But I thought he at least would be himself, and not a conventional parent. I am sure he has been a very queer sort of parent hitherto; but the moment a fight comes, he puts himself on his own side.”
She gave forth these opinions very calmly, lying back in the long chair, with her hands clasped behind her head, and her eyes following abstractedly the lines of the French coast. The voice which uttered sentiments so strange to Frances was of the most refined and harmonious tones, low, soft, and clear. And the lines of her slim elastic figure, and of her perfectly appropriate dress, which combined simplicity and costliness, carelessness and consummate care, as only high art can, added to the effect of a beauty which was not beauty in any demonstrative sense, but rather harmony, ease, grace, fine health, fine training, and what, for want of a better word, we call blood. Not that the bluest blood in the world inevitably carries with it this perfection of tone; but Constance had the effect which a thoroughbred horse has upon the connoisseur. It would have detracted from the impression she made had there been any special point upon which the attention lingered—had her eyes, or her complexion, her hands, or her hair, or any individual trait, called for particular notice. But hers was not beauty of that description.
Her sister, who was, so to speak, only a little rustic, sat and gazed at her in a kind of rapture. Her heart did not, as yet at least, go out towards this intruder into her life; her affections were as yet untouched; and her temper was a little excited, disturbed by the critical tone which her sister assumed, and the calm frankness with which she spoke. But though all these dissatisfied, almost hostile sentiments were in Frances’ mind, her eyes and attention were fascinated. She could not resist the influence which this external perfection of being produced upon her. It was only perhaps now in the full morning light, in the abandon of this confidence and candour, which had none of the usual tenderness of confidential revelations, but rather a certain half-disdainful self-discovery which necessity demanded, that Frances fully perceived her sister’s gifts. Her own impatience, her little impulses of irritation and contradiction, died away in the wondering admiration with which she gazed. Constance showed no sign even of remarking the effect she produced. She said meditatively, dropping the words into the calm air without any apparent conception of novelty or wonder in them, “I wonder how you will like it when you have to go.”