"Roland told me a great deal about you," she said. "I suppose we are cousins too. You look very nice. I hope you will enjoy yourself." She was a very deliberate, measured talker, doing everything steadily. When Hester was gone, she resumed her seat beside her grandmother.
"Roland admires her very much. She is pretty, but I should think she had a great deal of temper," Emma said.
"Temper is scarcely the word. She is a great favourite with your grandfather—and with me too—with me too."
"Roland told me," said Emma. "When I say temper I don't mean any harm. She would do much better for Roland if she had a good deal of temper. That is what he wants to keep him straight; for a man ought not to flirt after he is married, and he will, unless she keeps him in order."
"Married! but is he likely to marry? I did not hear anything of it."
"When a man can keep a sister he can keep a wife," said Emma, announcing this fact as if it were an oracle. "He has a house, and everything that is necessary. And of course I shall not stand in his way. I can go back to Elinor, where I am a sort of head nurse, and cheap enough at the money; or I can be a governess. That touches his pride—he does not like that."
Here the old captain came back, who had been putting his favourite carefully into the fly.
"Why has she not her mother with her?" he said. "I like a girl to have her mother with her. It is pretty, it is natural. I do not like those new-fashioned, independent ways."
"But they are much more convenient, grandpapa," said Emma. "Think how I should have been situated had a girl always wanted her mother with her. Elinor, with her family, cannot always be going out; and when she goes she likes to amuse herself, she does not go for me. A girl going out with her mother means a devoted sort of old lady like the mothers in books. Such nonsense, you know—for a girl's mother, when she is eighteen or so, is rarely more than forty, and people of forty like amusement just as much as we do. It is better, on the whole, I think, when every one is for herself."