“You mean you want to have a run to town?”
“Yes, dear,” said his mother, “go if you think you could be of any use. Oh, you don’t know what it is you are talking of so lightly. I could tell you things—Oh, Fred, if you think there is anything going on, any danger—”
“Nothing of the sort,” he said, with a laugh. “We were only wondering what we should be good for mother—not much, I believe. I might perhaps draw for the Graphic fancy pictures of battles and that sort of thing; or, if the worst came to the worst, there is the Police News.”
“You have both got Vocations,” said Phyllis. “It is fine for you. You know what to do, you two. But I can do nothing; I should have to Marry.” She spoke with a languid emphasis as of capitals, in her speech.
“Oh, children!” cried Mrs. Dirom, “what are you thinking of? You think all that is clever, but it does not seem clever to me. It is just the dreadful thing in business that one day you may be up at the top of the tree, and next morning—”
“Nowhere!” said Fred, with a burlesque groan. And then they all laughed. The anxious middle-class mother looked at them as the hen of the proverb looks at her ducklings. Silly children! what did they know about it? She could have cried in vexation and distress.
“You laugh,” she said, “but you would not laugh if you knew as much as I do. The very name of such a thing is unlucky. I wouldn’t let myself think of it lest it should bring harm. Things may be quite right, and I hope and believe they are quite right: but if there was so much as a whisper on the Exchange that his children—his own children—had been joking on the subject. Oh, a whisper, that’s enough!”
The young people were not in the least impressed by what she said—they had not been brought up in her sphere. That alarm for exposure, that dread of a catastrophe which was strong in her bosom, had no response in theirs. They had no more understanding of poverty than of Paradise—and to the girls in particular, the idea of a great event, a matter of much noise and commotion, to be followed by new enchanting freedom and the possibilities of adventure, was really “fun!” as they said. They were not afraid of being dropped by their friends.
Society has undergone a change in this respect. A young lady turned into a fashionable dressmaker would be the most delightful of lions; all her acquaintances would crowd round her. She would be celebrated as “a noble girl” by the serious, and as chic by the fast.
Doris looked forward to the possibility with a delightful perception of all the advantages that were in it. It was more exciting than the other expedient of marrying, which was all that, in the poverty of her invention, occurred to Phyllis. They made very merry, while their mother trembled with an alarm for which there was no apparent foundation. She was nervous, which is always a ready explanation of a woman’s troubles and fears.