“I wish you would not, Emily. I have heard you say that Miss Price in the village was a very good dressmaker—— ”
“For those who can afford her,” said Mrs. Pennithorne. “But,” she added, with a better inspiration, “you make me look as if I were complaining, and I don’t want to complain. Though it is dull, William, you must allow, sitting all the evening by one’s self—— ”
“But I have to do the same,” he said, with gentle hypocrisy. “You know, Emily, if I wrote my sermon here, we should fall to talking, which no doubt is far pleasanter—but it is not duty, and duty must come before all—— ”
“There is more than one kind of duty,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, who was tearing her fingers with pins putting together two sides of Mary’s frock. While she was bending over this, the maid came into the room with a note. There was something in the “Ah!” with which he took it which made his wife raise her head. She was not jealous of Miss Musgrave, who was nearly ten years older than herself, an old maid, and beneath consideration; but she did think that William thought a great deal too much of the Castle. “What is it now?” she said pettishly. Perhaps once more—they had done it several times already—it was an invitation to dinner for Mr. Pennithorne alone. But he was so much interested in what he was reading that he did not even hear her. She sat with her scissors in her hand, and looked at him while he read the note, his face changing, his whole mind absorbed. He did not look like that when their common affairs were discussed, or the education of his children, which ought to be more interesting to him than anything else. This was other people’s business—and how it took him up! Mrs. Pennithorne was a good woman, and did her duty to her neighbours when it was very clearly indicated; but still, of course, nothing could be of such consequence as your own family, and your duty to them. And to see how he was taken up, smiling, looking as if he might be going to cry! Nothing about Johnny or Mary ever excited him so. Mrs. Pennithorne was not only vexed on her own account, but felt it to be wrong.
“Well, life is a wonderful thing,” he said suddenly. “I went to the Castle this afternoon—— ”
“You are always going to the Castle,” she said, in a fretful voice.
“—Expressly to tell Miss Musgrave how much my mind had been occupied about her brother John. You never knew him, Emily; but he was my pupil, and I was very fond of him—— ”
“You are very fond of all the family, I think,” she said, half-interested, half-aggrieved.
“Perhaps I was,” he said, with a little sigh, which, however, she did not notice; “but John particularly. He was a fine fellow, though he was so hot-headed. The other night I kept dreaming of him, all night long—over and over again.”
“That was what made you so restless, I suppose,” Mrs. Pennithorne put in, in a parenthesis. “I am sure you have plenty belonging to yourself to dream of, if you want to dream.”