“Why, then, Miss Waring, if you think so——”
“Am I here? Oh, that is easily explained. I have a sister.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Ah, I understand you have heard a great deal about my sister. I suffer here from being compared with her. I am not nearly so good, so wise, as Frances. But is that my fault, Captain Gaunt? You are impartial; you are a new-comer. If I could, I would, be as nice as Frances, don’t you believe?”
The young man gave Constance a look, which, indeed, she expected, and said with confusion, “I don’t see—any need for improvement,” and blushed as near crimson as was possible over the greenish brown of his Indian colour.
Constance for her part did not blush. She laughed, and made him an almost imperceptible curtsey. The ways of flirtation are not original, and all the parallels of the early encounters might be stereotyped, as everybody knows.
“You are very amiable,” she said; “but then you don’t know Frances, and your opinion, accordingly, is less valuable. I did not ask you, however, to believe me to be equal to my sister, but only to believe that I would be as nice if I could. However, all that is no explanation. We have a mother, you know, in England. We are, unfortunately, that sad thing, a household divided against itself.”
Captain Gaunt was not prepared for such confidences. He grew still a little browner with embarrassment, and muttered something about being very sorry, not knowing what to say.
“Oh, there is not very much to be sorry about. Papa enjoys himself in his way here, and mamma is very happy at home. The only thing is that we must each have our turn, you know—that is only fair. So Frances has gone to mamma, and here am I in Bordighera. We are each dreadfully out of our element. Her friends condemn me, to begin with, as if it were my fault that I am not like her; and my friends, perhaps—— But no; I don’t think so. Frances is so good, so nice, so everything a girl ought to be.”
At this she laughed softly again; and young Gaunt’s consciousness that his mother’s much vaunted Frances was the sort of girl to please old ladies rather than young men, a prim, little, smooth, correct maiden, with not the least “go” in her, took additional force and certainty. Whereas—— But he had no words in which to express his sense of the advantages on the other side.