Bridget rose hastily, putting down her cup, and gave him her hand, smiling.
“Helen is out,” she said, “shopping with Miss Mansfield, you know. It’s perfectly delightful to see Helen excited over her frocks,” she went on, confidentially, with a little laugh, as Carey took the chair opposite to her. “In the old days, before Jim, she always reminded me of the lilies of the field, in her serene toil not attitude towards her clothes. Now, chiffon is a vital question; she doesn’t consider it a matter for jesting, and I’m considered flippant because I don’t approach the subject with sufficient reverence.” She laughed again.
“Are you held to be unworthy to officiate in these solemn rites, then?” Carey asked.
“Oh, no! I should have gone shopping also, with a solemnity befitting the occasion, but I have a class at Forest Hill on Tuesdays, you know. I’ve only just come in. Let me implore you not to go away with the idea that I despise chiffons!” she added, earnestly. “I love them—I always have; and if any one at my baptism promised in my name to renounce them, it was like his impertinence.”
She was pouring out tea as she talked. Carey absently watched her white, slender fingers touching the dainty pink china as she moved the cups on the tray. She wore a perfectly plain dark serge dress. As he crossed to the tea-table to take the cup she held out to him, she raised her face. Her bright eyes were filled with amusement; there was a smile on her lips. She looked much as she did when he first met her. His impression of her as a brilliant, self-contained woman of the world seemed curiously incongruous in the presence of her newly recovered girlishness.
“You are teaching, then?—and writing too, I hope?” Carey asked. “You like teaching, don’t you?”
“Children, yes; grown-ups, no,” she returned. “Children are charming, simply charming, when they’re listening intently to the words of wisdom that fall from one’s lips. It’s necessary to make the words fall in somewhat eccentric positions, by the way, or else this admirable intentness is not observable to any great extent. But when one does get the whole attention of a class of little children, there’s nothing quite like it, for pure pleasure. Their serious eyes are so pretty, and their characteristic attitudes of attention are sweet too. By which remark you will have discovered that I’m no formal disciplinarian. When I was at school they clicked at us with a miserable little wooden apparatus. One click meant hands in laps; two clicks, sit bolt upright; three, attention!—which, being interpreted, signified, take every atom of individuality out of your personal appearance, and become as much like a little automaton as circumstances will permit. Oh, if I could have ground that clicker to pieces!” They both laughed.
“It doesn’t seem to have been a complete success in your case,” he said. “The figure would not work, in fact.”
“No; but then I never conformed to anything. I suppose I never have. There are some people who are born to kick against the pricks—foolish, no doubt; it wears one’s shoes out, and if they are pretty shoes it seems a pity; but—” She gave her shoulders a little shrug, and paused.
“Better are shabby shoes and freedom therewith,” returned Carey, looking up with a smile; and then he too paused abruptly. It struck him, suddenly, that he had trenched unintentionally upon delicate ground.