"Nor I," cried Miss Vernon, with another laugh. "You shall carry the problem a little further, if you please. I feared that her coming would disturb us all, and yet I am half pleased in my heart, being such a bad woman, that she is going to make a disturbance to prove me right. You see I don't spare myself."
"It amuses you to make out your own motives as well as other people's: and to show how they contradict each other," Edward said, shaking his head.
This little bit of metaphysics refreshed Miss Vernon. She became quite herself again, as she told him her story.
"The little firebrand!" she said, "the little spitfire! facing me on my own ground, defying me, Catherine Vernon, in the very Vernonry, my own creation!"
"I wonder what the child could mean by it; it must have been ignorance."
"Very likely it was ignorance: but it was more; it was opposition, firm, healthy, instinctive opposition, without any cause for it; that is a sort of thing which it refreshes one to see. It must have been born in her, don't you see? for she didn't know me, never set eyes on me. The little wild cat! She felt in every nerve of her that we were in opposition, she and I."
"Don't you think you give too much importance to the nonsense of a girl? I know," said Edward, with a very serious nod of his head, "what girls are. I have six sisters. They are strange beings. They will go all off at a tangent in a moment. Pull a wrong string, touch a wrong stop, and they are all off—in a moment."
"You forget that I was once a girl myself."
"It is a long time ago, Aunt Catherine," said the ruthless young man. "I dare say you have forgotten: whereas I, you know, have studied the subject up to its very last development."