CHAPTER XVII.
Harry’s Turn.
It would be vain to tell all that was said, and all that was done, and all the calculations that were gone through in the house in Berkeley Square, where Edgar’s visit had produced so much emotion. The interviews carried on in all the different rooms would furnish forth a volume. The girls, who had peered over the staircase to see him go away, and whose state of suspense was indescribable, made a dozen applications at Gussy’s door before the audience of Ada, who had the best right to hear, was over. Then Mary insisted upon getting admission in her right of bride, as one able to enter into Gussy’s feelings, and sympathise with her; and poor little Beatrice, left out in the cold, had to content herself with half a dozen words, whispered in the twilight, when they all went to dress for dinner. Beatrice cried with wounded feeling, to think that because she, by the decrees of Providence, was neither the elder sister, nor engaged to be married, she was therefore to be shut out from all participation in Gussy’s secrets.
“Could I be more interested if I was twice as old as Ada, and engaged to six Lord Grantons!” cried the poor child. And Gussy’s prospects were in that charming state of uncertainty that they would stand discussing for hours together; whereas, by the time Lord Granton had been pronounced a darling, and the dresses all decided upon, even down to the colour of the bridesmaids’ parasols, there remained absolutely nothing new to be gone over with Mary, but just the same thing again and again.
“When do you think you shall be married?” said Beatrice, tremulously.
“I don’t know, and I don’t very much care, so long as it is all right,” said Gussy, half laughing, half crying.
“But what if papa will not consent?” said Mary, with a face of awe.
“Papa is too sensible to fight when he knows he should not win the battle,” said the deliciously, incomprehensibly courageous Gussy.
There was some gratification to be got out of a betrothed sister of this fashion. Beatrice even began to look down upon Mary’s unexciting loves.
“As for your affair, it is so dreadfully tame,” she said, contemptuously lifting her little nose in the air. “Everybody rushing to give their consent, and presents raining down upon you, and you all so self-satisfied and confident.”
Mary was quite taken down from her pedestal of universal observation. She became the commonest of young women about to be married, by Gussy’s romantic side.