“Don’t let us have it all over again,” said Evelyn, “I take no interest in it. By the way I have just had a strange visitor—his daughter, Madeline. She tells me that your daughter is her dearest friend.”
“His daughter? Oh, Rosamond! yes, she and Maddy run about everywhere together, and plot all manner of things.”
“Are you not afraid of their plottings, two wild girls together.”
“I afraid! oh dear, not I; they will probably both marry before they have time to do any mischief. That puts all nonsense out of their head. I know! they are going to walk the hospitals, and heaven knows what; relieve the poor and also see life. I never contradict them—what is the use? Somebody will turn up in their first or second season with enough of money and sufficiently presentable. And they will be married off, and become like other people, and we shall hear of their vagaries no more.”
“They will then have every moment occupied, and more things to do than hours to do them in, Madeline, like you.”
“Precisely like me,” said the woman of the world; “and an excellent good thing, too, Evelyn, if you would allow yourself to see it. Do you think it would be so good for me if I had more time to think? My dear, you know many things a great deal better than I do, but you don’t know the world. There are as many worries in a day in London as there are in a year out of it. That is, I mean there are in society, both in London and the country, annoyances such as you people in your tranquillity never can understand. I am not without my troubles, though I don’t wear them on my sleeve. I do what is far better. I am so busy, I have not time to think of them. There are troubles about money, troubles about the boys, troubles about—well, Leighton is not always a model husband, my dear, like yours. And it will be well for the girls if they do as I do, and don’t leave themselves too much time to think.”
“They seem,” said Evelyn, glad to turn the seriousness of this speech aside and not to seem curious (though she was) about her friend’s troubles, “to exercise the privilege of thinking very freely at their present stage. But this poor girl has no mother, and no doubt she has been left a great deal to herself.”
“I know you don’t mean that for a hit at me,” said her friend; “though you may perhaps think a woman with so much to do must neglect her children. Madeline is every bit as bad as Rosamond, my dear. They mean no harm either of them. They want, poor darlings, to work for their living and to see life. It is a pity their brothers don’t share their youthful fancies. The boys prefer to do nothing, and the kind of life they see is not very desirable. But by the blessing of Providence nothing very dreadfully bad comes of it either way. The girls find that they have to marry and settle down, like their mothers before them; and the boys—well, the boys! oh, they come out of it somehow at the end.”
And to the great amazement of Evelyn, this woman of the world, this busy idler and frivolous fine lady suddenly fell into a low outburst of crying, as involuntary as it was unexpected, saying, amid her tears: “Oh, please God, please God, they will all come through at the end!”
Mrs. Rowland was a woman who had known a great deal of trouble, but when she was thus the witness of her friend’s unsuspected pain, she said to herself that she was an ignorant woman and knew nothing. She had not believed there was anything serious at all, not to say anguish and martyrdom, in Madeline Leighton’s life. She held her friend in her arms for a moment, and they kissed each other; but Evelyn did not ask any question. Perhaps Lady Leighton thought she had told her everything, perhaps she had that instinctive sense that everybody must know, which belongs to the class who are accustomed to have their movements chronicled, and all they do known. For she offered no explanation, but only said, as she raised her head from Evelyn’s shoulder and dried her eyes, with a little tremulous laugh in which the tears still lingered, “I am as sure of that as I am that I live. If we didn’t think so, half of us would die.”