“Miss Summerhayes! why did you laugh as we came upstairs?”
“Oh!” said Janet, quite restored from that momentary impression. “I don’t know. Because it is curious to come into the middle of a story; it is like beginning a book, as you do sometimes, at the third volume. One wonders what has happened before, as well as what is going to happen now.”
“You think that’s a story!” cried Julia, with scorn; “because Gussy’s a fool, and that man—I can’t endure that man.”
“You make that too easy for anyone to see. I think you made a sound like what they do in the theatre.”
“I hissed him,” said Julia, her lowering eyebrows closing down over her eyes. “I always do. He can’t bear to be hissed. He is just like an actor: it makes him mad, and that is why I do it, and I always shall. I don’t care what anyone says.”
“That is a pity,” said Janet; “for it will not harm him, but you. You forget that people care very little for the opinion of a girl at your age, especially when it is rudely expressed.”
“They don’t care much for your opinion,” said Julia, furiously.
“No; I did not expect it; and I have no opinion, except that you must learn to be a gentlewoman—if that can be learnt—or else I must go away.”
Julia received this, as she usually did Janet’s remonstrances, with a look of rage, a flush of shame, and then a sudden self-subdual.
“You want to go away,” she said. “You are the only nice one that has ever been here; and you want to go and leave me. I know you do. You’ll go before Dolff comes home, and then he’ll never know you, and will think—will just think I am a stupid and don’t know anything, as they all do!”