“Your daughter isn’t facile, is she?” she asked abruptly.
“What, ma’am?” asked the mother, gazing with tears in her eyes, delicious tears, at the bust which would have passed as an Athene or a Clio.
“Well, not easy to deal with—not easy to make believe things; likes her own way, don’t she?”
“Well, ma’am,” said Mrs. Massarene doubtfully, “sweet-tempered she is, and forgetful of self to a fault, and I wouldn’t lay blame to her as obstinate. But if you mean as how she can be firm, well, she can; and if you mean as how she can have opinions, well, she have.”
Lady Kenilworth laughed, but she was vexed.
“That’s what I do mean. Nobody has that straight profile for nothing; where did she get it?”
“Lord, ma’am, however should I know,” said the mother meekly. “She don’t take after either of us, that’s a fact. The children pick up their own looks in heaven, I think, for often nobody can account for ’em on earth. Look at your own little dears; what black eyes they all have, and you and my lord so fair. I met them in the Park this morning, my lady. Would you let them come and see me some day?”
Lady Kenilworth, to her own extreme amazement and annoyance, felt herself color as the straightforward gaze of this common woman looked in sincerity and in ignorance at her.
“The children shall certainly come to see you if you wish,” she said. “But they are naughty little people. They will bother you horribly. And pray, my dear woman, don’t say ‘My lady,’ you set all my nerves on edge.”
Mrs. Massarene humbly excused herself. “It comes natural,” she said with a sigh; “I was dairymaid at the Hall. William can’t bear me to say I was, but I don’t see as it matters.”