“I don’t know what to say to you, Miss Ogilvie. That is just my difficulty with the girls,” said Fred, promptly throwing his sisters over as they had divined. “They have so little perception. Not a bad sort in themselves, and devoted to you: but without tact—without your delicacy of feeling—without——”
“Oh,” cried Effie, “you must not compare them with me; they are far, far cleverer—far more instructed—far—— It was so silly of me to be vexed——”
“Not silly at all; just what you would naturally be with your refined taste. I can’t tell you how I felt it,” said Fred, giving himself credit for the perception that was wanting in his sisters. “But you will forgive them, Miss Ogilvie? they will be so unhappy.”
“Oh no,” cried Effie, with once more a sense of the ludicrous in this assertion. But Fred was as grave as an owl, and meant every word he said.
“Yes, indeed, and they deserve to be so; but if I may tell them that you forgive them——”
“It is not worth speaking about, Mr. Dirom; I was foolish too. And are you really going to have Americans here? I never saw any Americans. What interest would they take in our old churchyard, and Adam Fleming’s broken old gravestone?”
“They take more interest in that sort of thing than we do whom it belongs to; that is to say, it doesn’t belong to us. I am as much a new man as any Yankee, and have as little right. We are mere interlopers, you know.”
Fred said this with a charming smile he had, a smile full of frank candour and openness, which forestalled criticism. Effie had heard the same sentiment expressed by others with a very different effect. When Fred said it, it seemed a delightful absurdity. He laughed a little, and so, carried away by sympathetic feeling, did she, shame-faced and feeling guilty in her heart at the remembrance of the many times in which, without any sense of absurdity, she had heard the same words said.
“We are a queer family,” he continued in his pleasant explanatory way. “My father is the money-maker, and he thinks a great deal of it; but we make no money, and I think we are really as indifferent about it as if we had been born in the backwoods. If anything happened at the office I should take to my studio, and I hope I should not enjoy myself too much, but there would be the danger. ‘Ah, freedom is a noble thing,’ as old Barbour says.”
Effie did not know who old Barbour was, and she was uncertain how to reply. She said at last timidly, “But you could not do without a great deal of money, Mr. Dirom. You have everything you want, and you don’t know how it comes. It is like a fairy tale.”