“No, I don’t wish I had let it alone. I should like to take you by the shoulders and shake you. Oh, if I were your sister!” She broke off with a suggestive grind of her white teeth. “Eddy is bad enough,” she added after a moment. “He’s a little ape: I can do nothing with him; but I could put up with even Eddy better than I could put up with you—if I were your sister.”
“But fortunately you are not my sister.”
“No, nor your stepmother either,” said Rosamond with energy, “or I don’t know what I should do. Can’t you talk a little, can’t you try to dance a bit, can’t you be like other people? Usually I don’t advise other people so very much: they chatter for ever and ever, and talk a great deal of nonsense. But it reconciles one to them. When one sees you—”
“Perhaps I had better take myself off,” said Archie; “and then you will not have that annoyance any more.”
“You want to try to make me out to be a meddler and a busybody,” said Rosamond; “but I am not that. I only say what I feel. Why, you should be the one to make the house pleasant! You are going out to shoot to-morrow, you and Eddy, and we are to bring you your luncheon out on the hill. You ought to be all full of petits soucis, and make it pleasant for us; but you will not. I know what you will do. You will sit down on a stone as far away as you can go, and you will bend down your brow, and perhaps turn your back, and never say one word.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Archie, red with rage, especially as she shrugged up her shoulders, and put down her chin, and contracted her forehead in a manner which he felt to be more or less like himself.
“Yes, you will,” said Rosamond, with the point-blank contradiction of youth.
“No, I will not,” cried the boy, forgetting everything but his wrongs. A hot moisture came to his eyes. “I hate shooting,” he said; “I hate company. I hate all those antics I was not brought up to. What business have you to come here and want London manners from me?”
“You poor boy,” said Rosamond, shaking her highly poised head. “London manners,” she said, in a tone of the mildest philosophy, “are often just what yours are. Men in London ape being rude like you. They pretend to care for nothing; not to hear what people say to them. It is smart to be uncivil, don’t you know? If you keep it up, you will be the fashion when you go to town.”
Archie clenched his fist in the height of his passion; not, of course, to hit out at Rowland, but at somebody—at the London men—at the detestable world.