"He'll do without it," said Mr. Seton placidly. "I foresee the young man will be a reformed character before he leaves us;" and he lifted Launcelot from its seat on the blotter, and sat down happily to his sermon.
Elizabeth shook her head at her provokingly calm parent, and picking up the kitten, she walked to the door.
"Write a specially good sermon this week," she advised. "Remember Mr. Arthur Townshend will be a listener," and closed the door behind her before her father could think of a dignified retort.
Mrs. Henry Beauchamp, the "Aunt Alice" who had dropped the bombshell in to the Seton household, was the only sister of Elizabeth's dead mother. A widow and childless, she would have liked to adopt the whole Seton family, Mr. Seton included, had it been possible. She lived most of the year in London in her house in Portland Place, and in summer she joined the Setons in the South of Scotland.
Arthur Townshend was her husband's nephew. As he had lived much abroad, none of the Setons had met him; but now he was home, and Mrs. Beauchamp having failed in her attempt to persuade Elizabeth to join them in Switzerland, suggested he should pay a visit to Glasgow.
Elizabeth was seriously perturbed. Arthur Townshend had always been a sort of veiled prophet to her, an awe-inspiring person for whom people put their best foot foremost, so to speak. Unconsciously her aunt had given her the impression of a young man particular about trifles—"ill to saddle," as Marget would put it. And she had heard so much about his looks, his abilities, his brilliant prospects, that she had always felt a vague antipathy to the youth.
To meet this paragon at Portland Place would have been ordeal enough, but to have him thrust upon her as a guest, to have to feed him and entertain him for a week, her imagination boggled at it.
"It's like the mountain coming to Mahomet," she reflected. "Mahomet must have felt it rather a crushing honour too."
The question was, Should she try to entertain him? Should she tell people he was coming, and so have him invited out to dinner, invite interesting people to meet him, attempt elaborate meals, and thoroughly upset the household?
She decided she would not. For, she argued with herself, if he's the sort of creature I have a feeling he is, my most lofty efforts will only bore him, and I shall have bored myself to no purpose; if, on the other hand, he is a good fellow, he will like us best au naturel. She broke the news to Marget, who remained unmoved.