To this argument her husband had no reply handy, and after a moment she resumed—
“I am very glad to see you are going to be such friends with the Diroms, Effie; they’re fine girls. Miss Doris, as they call her, might have had her dress a little higher, but no doubt that’s the fault of those grand dressmakers that will have their own way. But the one I like is Mr. Fred. He is a very fine lad; he takes nothing upon him.”
“What should he take upon him? He’s nothing or nobody, but only a rich man’s son.”
“Robert, you are just the most bigoted, inconsiderate person! Well, I think it’s very difficult when you are just a rich person to be modest and young like yon. If you are a young duke that’s different; but to have nothing but money to stand upon—and not to stand upon that—”
“It is very well said,” said Uncle John, making her a bow. “There’s both charity and observation in what Mrs. Ogilvie says.”
“Is there not?” cried the lady in a flush of pleasure. “Oh no, I’m not meaning it is clever of me; but when a young man has nothing else, and is just pleasant, and never seems to mind, but singles out a bit little thing of a girl in a white frock—”
This made them all look at Effie, who as yet said nothing. She was leaning back in the other corner, tired yet flushed with the pleasure and novelty of finding herself so important a person. Her white frock was very simple, but yet it was the best she had ever had; and never before had Effie been “singled out,” as her stepmother said. The dinner party was a great event to her. Nothing so important had occurred before, nothing in which she herself had been so prominent. A pretty flush of colour came over her face.
There had been a great deal in Fred Dirom’s eyes which was quite new, mysterious, and even, in its novelty, delightful to Effie. She could scarcely help laughing at the recollection, and yet it made a warmth about her heart. To be flattered in that silent way—not by any mere compliment, but by the homage of a pair of eloquent eyes—is startling, strange, never unsweet to a girl. It is a more subtle coming of age than any birthday can bring. It shows that she has passed out of the band of little girls into that of those young princesses whom all the poets have combined to praise. This first sensation of the awakening consciousness has something exquisite in it not to be put into words.
Her blush grew deeper as she saw the group round all looking at her—her stepmother with a laugh of satisfaction, her father with a glance in which the usual drawing together of his shaggy eyebrows was a very poor simulation of a frown, and Uncle John with a liquid look of tender sympathy not unmingled with tender ridicule and full of love withal.
“Why do you all look at me like that?” Effie cried, to throw off the growing embarrassment. “I am not the only one that had a white frock.”