“The sisters?” said Mrs. Penton. An inexpressible sense of dislike, of displeasure, of repugnance came over her, as if some passing wind had carried it. “Not that sharp girl,” she said, with a look of fastidious dissatisfaction—something that moved the lines of her nostrils as if it offended a sense.
“Not the sharp girl, and not the boy,” said Russell Penton. “But then who is left?”
“My godchild is left, Alicia, the one I like best; or, rather, whom I—”
“Dislike least,” said her husband, with his laugh. “I can not see, now that everything is likely to be settled to your satisfaction, what possible reason there can be for disliking them at all.”
“There is none,” she said, with an effort. “I am the victim of a state of affairs which is over; I can not get my feelings into accordance with the new circumstances. You can not blame me, Gerald, more than I blame myself.”
He said nothing at all in reply to this, but turned away as he had done with the intention of going out, when she called him back. Once more she recalled him, with the same dull sense of his disapproval aching at her heart.
“Gerald, after all, you see I do not even wait till things are settled to ask the children. Give me a little credit for that.”
“You said, Alicia, that it was to please me.”
“And so it is! and so are many things—more, a great many more, than you think.”
He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked into her face. “You are always very good, very kind, and ready to please me. Is it for that I am to give you credit? or for generosity toward your young cousins? You are not very logical, you see.”