‘It is fortunate I haven’t got to live in it,’ he said.
‘Very fortunate—for you. But, sir,’ said Joyce, feeling more and more the authority and power of this big friendly man, like a very kind inspector in the old days—‘you are far more fortunate than they are. You are like a prince to them. You have everything you want—money and honour, and a beautiful house, and plenty of room, and power to do what you please. They say in my country, “It is ill talking between a full man and a fasting,"—if you understand that.’
The Canon humphed and shook his head, and then he laughed and said, ‘Oh yes, I understand that. So I am the full man and Sitwell the empty one, you think, Miss Joyce.’
‘It makes a great difference,’ said Joyce; ‘and then they think—that it was promised to them before they came here.’
‘Yes,’ said the Canon, after a pause, ‘it was promised to them in a way—before they showed what sort of free-lances they were.’
‘And that makes a sense of wrong,’ said Joyce, wisely taking no notice of the last remark. ‘If you think there is an injustice, it always hangs on the heart.’
‘The Canon is ‘ere before us,’ said the fat voice of Sir Samuel, as the sound of much scattering of the gravel under heavy feet broke suddenly upon this colloquy; ‘and I would say, by the looks of them, that this young lady has been a-lecturing the Canon. Good joke that, preaching to the Canon, that most times ’as it all his own way.’
Sir Sam’s laugh was a little asthmatic—it shook him subterraneously and in a succession of rolling echoes. ‘Good joke that, preaching to the Canon,’ he went on, as if his announcement of the fact was the climax of the joke. He was followed by Mrs. Jenkinson, tall and energetic, wrapped in a white chudder, the softest and most comfortable of shawls—and by Lady Thompson, panting and red in the face with the climb, and gorgeous in all the colours of the rainbow. The Canon made room for the two ladies on the bench, and Sir Sam got a garden-chair and seated himself in front of them, against the view which they had come to see, half shutting it out with his bulky person. But the view was no novelty to any there.
‘Yes,’ said the Canon, ‘it is quite true. This little thing has been lecturing me. Indeed I don’t hesitate to say she’s been giving it me hot and strong—about the Sitwells,’ he added, in a sort of aside to his wife.
‘I must say,’ said that lady indignantly, ‘I think that young ladies should keep their hastily-formed opinions to themselves. What can she know about the Sitwells that we don’t all know?’