“Certainly,” said Gussy with promptitude, opening her eyes wide at the same time in wonder at such a confession. “Don’t be angry with me,” she resumed; “I do so like to know everything about my friends. Do tell me! Was it Arthur Arden? Mamma would scold me dreadfully for asking; but I should so like to know. There, don’t tell me any more. I can see it was by your eyes. I know some people don’t like him; but he is very nice. I think you might have let him stay.”
“Do you think he is very nice?” said Edgar, who was, as she had divined, very fond of Gussy, though not (according to her own dialect) in that way.
“Yes,” said Gussy, jumping by instinct into the heart of the question. “The thing is, you know—but you serious people cannot understand—that he never means anything. He is very attentive, and all that. It is his way with girls. He makes you think there never was any one like you, and that he never had such an opinion of anybody before, and all that; but he never means anything. Even mamma says so. A very young girl might be taken in; but we all know that he means nothing, and I assure you he is very nice.”
“I don’t understand how such a man can be very nice,” said Edgar, with subdued annoyance, for he did not quite like the idea that Gussy herself should have gone through this discipline or made such a discovery. “I like people who mean more and not less than they say.”
“That is all very well, Mr. Arden, in most matters,” said Gussy, with a little hesitation and a momentary blush. (“I wonder if he means anything?” she was asking herself; but Edgar was looking at her with the simplest straightforwardness and making no pretences.) “But, you know, when it is only just the common chatter of society—— Well, why should everybody be so dreadfully sincere? People may just as well be agreeable. I am not standing up for flirting or that sort of thing. But still, you know, when you are quite sure that nothing is meant——”
“Don’t confuse my mind altogether,” said Edgar. “I am bewildered enough as it is. You go to places not to be amused, but because everybody is going; you do things you don’t care for because everybody does them; and now you tell me men are very ‘nice’ because they never mean anything. My brain is going very fast, but I think this last doctrine is the most confusing of all.”
“You would see the sense of it if you were in our position,” said Gussy, shaking her pretty head. “Now, for instance, Arthur Arden—suppose, just for the sake of argument, that he was really in love with one of us. It sounds ridiculous, does it not? What do you suppose papa and mamma would say? They would send him out of the house very quickly you may be sure; and the poor girl, whoever it was, would be scolded to death. Oh, there would be such a business in the house! Worse than there was when poor Fred. Burton wanted to marry Ada. Perhaps you never heard of that?”
“No, indeed,” said Edgar, to whom Ada, who was the quiet one, had always appeared the least interesting of the family.
“He was the curate at Thorne,” said Gussy; “and, of course, he ought never to have dreamt of such a thing; but Harry had been at college with him, and he was very nice, and came to us constantly. I liked him myself—indeed, we all liked him; and if he only had had two thousand or so a-year, or even less, as he was a clergyman—— But he had only about twopence,” said Gussy, with a sigh; “and what was poor papa to do?”
“And Miss Thornleigh?” asked Edgar, with all the impulsive interest in a love story which comes natural to an unsophisticated mind. Ada was sitting at the other end of the room with a great basket before her full of pieces of coloured print. She was making little frocks for her poor children—a work in which by fits and starts the other girls would give her uncertain aid.