‘But you are not a country clergyman, Aunt Emily.’
‘Heaven forbid!’ that lady said.
Next time it was Emily alone who ran ‘across,’ as they called it. ‘Mamma thinks on the whole we might walk. The roads have dried up beautifully, and it’s not far. And walking is always correct in the country, isn’t it, aunt?’
‘It is always correct anywhere, Emmy, when you have no other way to go.’
‘Ah, but we have two other ways to go! There is the fly, which I should prefer, as it protects one most, and there’s our own pony-chaise. It cannot be supposed to be for the want of means of driving, Aunt Emily, if we pleased.’
‘Of course not,’ said Lady William with great gravity. ‘And there is a gipsy van somewhere about. I have always thought I should like to drive about the country in a gipsy van.’
Emmy gave her aunt a look of reproach: but by this time her sister had arrived with Mrs. Plowden’s ultimatum. ‘If the sun comes out mamma will call for you at the door, if you will please to be ready by three; but if it is overcast she will come in the fly. So that is all settled, I hope.’
Mab had maintained a great calm during all these searchings of heart. She was not going, and had she been going it would have been a matter of the greatest indifference to her, consciously a plain, and what is still more dreadful to the imagination, a fat girl, whether her hair was blown about or not, and what first impression Mrs. Swinford or even Leo Swinford might form of her. As for Leo Swinford, indeed, in face of the fact that he had called at the Cottage the night before, she felt for him something of that familiarity which breeds contempt: and how it could matter to anybody what he thought was to Mab’s youthful soul a wonder not to be expressed.
‘What are you so anxious about, after all?’ she said. ‘If your hair is untidy, what of that? Everybody in Watcham knows exactly how your hair looks, Emmy, whether it is just newly done and tidy, or whether it is hanging about your ears.’
‘I hope it never hangs about my ears,’ said Emmy primly, yet with indignation. If there was one thing upon which she prided herself, it was the tidiness in which she stood superior over all her peers.