Lady Markham looked for a moment as if she would be angry; then she took the better way, and laughed. “He is little and young,” she said; “but neither so young nor even so small as you think. He is most wonderfully, portentously rich, my dear; and he is very nice and good and intelligent and generous. You must not take up a prejudice against him because he is not an athlete or a giant. There are plenty of athletes in Society, my love, but very, very few with a hundred thousand a-year.”
“It is so strange to me to hear about money,” said Frances. “I hope you will pardon me, mamma. I don’t understand. I thought he was perhaps some one who was delicate, whose mother, perhaps, you knew, whom you wanted to be kind to.”
“Quite true,” said Lady Markham, patting her daughter’s cheek with a soft finger; “and well judged: but something more besides. I thought, I allow, that it would be an excellent match for Constance; not only because he was rich, but also because he was rich. Do you see the difference?”
“I—suppose so,” Frances said; but there was not any warmth in the admission. “I thought the right way,” she added after a moment, with a blush that stole over her from head to foot, “was that people fell in love with each other.”
“So it is,” said her mother, smiling upon her. “But it often happens, you know, that they fall in love respectively with the wrong people.”
“It is dreadful to me to talk to you, who know so much better,” cried Frances. “All that I know is from stories. But I thought that even a wrong person, whom you chose yourself, was better than——”
“The right person chosen by your mother? These are awful doctrines, Frances. You are a little revolutionary. Who taught you such terrible things?” Lady Markham laughed as she spoke, and patted the girl’s cheek more affectionately than ever, and looked at her with unclouded smiles, so that Frances took courage. “But,” the mother went on, “there was no question of choice on my part. Constance has known Claude Ramsay all her life. She liked him, so far as I knew. I supposed she had accepted him. It was not formally announced, I am happy to say; but I made sure of it, and so did everybody else—including himself, poor fellow—when, suddenly, without any warning, your sister disappeared. It was unkind to me, Frances,—oh, it was unkind to me!”
And suddenly, while she was speaking, two tears appeared all at once in Lady Markham’s eyes.
Frances was deeply touched by this sight. She ventured upon a caress, which as yet, except in timid return, to those bestowed upon her, she had not been bold enough to do. “I do not think Constance can have meant to be unkind,” she said.
“Few people mean to be unkind,” said this social philosopher, who knew so much more than Frances. “Your aunt Clarendon does, and that makes her harmless, because one understands. Most of those who wound one, do it because it pleases themselves, without meaning anything—or caring anything—don’t you see?—whether it hurts or not.”