"You'd take Bennet, wouldn't you?" I asked heavily, and she replied:
"You better believe I would!"
"Don't you like Mr. Hamilton?" I asked wistfully.
"I don't entirely trust him," said she. "Candidly, Nora, that was a nasty trick he tried to play us here. I was 'on to him,' but I didn't know just where you stood with him, and I'm not in the preaching business. I let people do as they like, and I myself do what I please; and then, of course, Lord knows I need all the money I can get." She sighed. Poor woman, she was always so hard up! "So if he wanted to take those rooms and pay the price, I wasn't going to be the one to stand in the way. Still, I was not going to let him pull the wool over your eyes, poor kiddy."
"I suppose not," I assented languidly. I was unutterably tired and heartsick, with the long strain of those weeks, and now with this quarrel with Lolly, and I said, "Yet I'd give my immortal soul to be with him again just for a few minutes even."
"You would?" she said. "You want to see him as much as all that?"
I nodded, and she said pityingly:
"Don't love any man like that, dear. None of them is worth it."
I didn't answer. What was the use? She said I looked tired out, and had better go to bed, and that next day she would send the man who looked after the furnace for my belongings.
Mrs. Kingston was really delighted to have me with her. She said she could have had any number of girls in her house before this, but that she had set her heart on having just me, because I was uncommon. She had a funny habit of dismissing people and things as "ordinary and commonplace." I was not that, it seems.