She trembled a little, and asked, softly, ‘What will they not let be, Jack?’
‘Oh, Elly, that I should look to you so for sympathy; that you should be my dear friend; that you should be Elly to me. You allow me to say it, but they wouldn’t. And what am I to do without you?’ he said, in full sincerity and alarm. He did not at all think of her in the matter, which perhaps was natural enough.
‘Don’t think of that, Jack. Call me what you have always called me, and think of me as you have always thought. If you give it up as if you were frightened, that may put what you say into their heads.’
‘But I see the justice of it,’ said John. ‘You are not a little girl, but a beautiful young lady. What right has a fellow like me, without any recommendations, with nothing in his favour except being very fond of you, what right have I to call you Elly? My judgment agrees with theirs, though I think it will break my heart.’
‘I see no occasion for any judgment on the matter,’ said Elly, raising her head with a certain pride. ‘If you think so, I can’t help it. But I’ve always been allowed to have an opinion of my own: and since I choose to be your friend as we have been all our lives, and to call you Jack—and be Elly to you—let them, if they have any objections, make them to me.’
‘How sweet you are and how you look! like a guardian angel,’ cried poor John, ‘but they will not let that be, either. For they will say I have no right to appeal to you at all, that I ought to know better; that I am a man and have been about the world, and you are only a girl——’
‘If you think I am only a girl,’ cried Elly, with great offence, ‘it can’t be any matter to you whether I stand by you or not, a thing of so little account!’
‘You know that is not what I mean,’ said the boy, with a long-drawn breath that was almost a sob. He, who was so much older than his age, felt now what a young, helpless, impotent being he was before all that force of opposition and good sense and fact. ‘I wish,’ he cried, looking at her with a certain fond impatience, ‘that you were only a girl as you used to be, with your hair waving upon your shoulders—I wish you had put off growing up for a few years, Elly! You are a woman now, and as good as a queen. And it is right they should keep everything from you that is not the best. I understand it quite well, and I agree with it, though it is against myself.’
Elly flushed and grew pale again while he was making this speech: and matters had grown very serious, for there was no telling what in his excited condition he might say next. She looked at him for a moment doubtfully, and then she put her hand on his arm in a way she had often done when they were boy and girl together, not to lean upon him, you may be sure, which was not at all Elly’s way, but to push him on before her on the way which she had determined was that he ought to go.
‘I don’t know what is the good of talking like this,’ she said, ‘making yourself unhappy and me too. Wait till somebody objects. What is the good of going and meeting bother before it comes? It is time enough to stand on the defensive when somebody attacks us. You were always fond of making sure that something was going to happen: and generally nothing happened. Do you remember the time when we upset the ink bottle over Mr. Cattley’s sermon—when you expected for a whole week we should get into disgrace, and he only laughed to Aunt Mary about it, and did nothing to us at all?’