“Poetry!” said Miss Dempster, “you’re meaning silly nonsense. They are just two haverels these two daft-like girls with their dark rooms, and all their affected ways; and as for the brother——”
“What about the brother?” said Effie, with an almost imperceptible change of tone.
“Aha!” said the old lady, “now we see where the interest lies.”
“It is nothing of the kind,” cried the girl, “it is just your imagination. You take a pleasure in twisting every word, and making me think shame. It is just to hear what you have got to say.”
“I have not very much to say,” said Miss Dempster; “we’re great students of human nature, both Beenie and me; but I cannot just give my opinion off-hand. There’s one thing I will tell you, and that is just that he is not our Ronald, which makes all the difference to me.”
“Ronald!” cried the girl, wondering. “Well, no! but did anybody ever say he was like Ronald?”
She paused a little, and a soft suffusion of colour once more came over her face. “What has Ronald to do with it? He is no more like Ronald than he is like—me.”
“And I don’t think him like you at all,” cried Miss Dempster quickly, “which is just the whole question. He is not of your kind, Effie. We’re all human creatures, no doubt, but there’s different species. Beenie, what do you think? Would you say that young Fred Dirom—that is the son of a merchant prince, and so grand and so rich—would you say he was of our own kind? would you say he was like Effie, or like Ronald? Ronald’s a young man about the same age; would you say he was of Ronald’s kind.”
“Bless me, what a very strange question!” Miss Beenie looked up with every evidence of alarm. Her spectacles fell from her nose; the stocking in which her hand and arm were enveloped fell limp upon her lap.
“I’ve no time to answer conundrums; they’re just things for winter evenings, not for daylight. And when you know how I’ve been against it from the very first,” she added, after a pause, with some warmth. “It might be a grand thing from a worldly point of view; but what do we know about him or his connections? And as for business, it is just a delusion; it’s up to-day and down to-morrow. I’ve lived in Glasgow, and I know what it means. Ye may be very grand, and who but you for a while; and then the next moment nothing. No; if there was not another man in the world, not the like of that man,” cried Miss Beenie, warming more and more, gesticulating unconsciously with the muffled hand which was all wrapped up in stocking; “and to compare him with our poor Ronald——” She dropped suddenly from her excitement, as if this name had brought her to herself. “You are making me say what I ought not to say—and before Effie! I will never be able to look one of them in the face again.”