With this half promise Georgie was obliged to be content. She knew well enough that, if Eoa brought the question before her uncle, the truth would come out that Sir Cradock had never dreamed for a moment of substituting Georgie, the daughter of his cousin, for Eoa, the only daughter of his only brother Clayton. He knew, of course, that the Eastern maiden had no artificial polish; but he saw that she had an inborn truth, a delicacy of feeling, and a native sympathy, which wanted only experience to be better than any polish.
From that day forth, Mrs. Corklemore (aided perhaps by physical terror) formed a higher estimate of Eoaʼs powers. So she changed her tactics altogether, and employed her daughter, that sharp little Flore, to cover the next advance. Flore was a little beauty; so far as anything artificial can be really beautiful. Dressed, as she was, in the height of French fashion, and herself nine–tenths of a Frenchwoman—for there is no such thing as a French girl, as we Englishmen understand girlhood—she always looked like a butterfly, just born in and just about to pop out of a bower; for little Flore was “divinely beautiful.”
This angel was now nearly four years old, and would look at you with the loveliest eyes that ever appealed from the cradle to heaven, and throw her exaggerated little figure back, and tell you the biggest lie that an angel ever wiped her mouth over. Oh, you lovely child! I would rather have Loo Jupp, who knows a number of bad words, which you would faint to hear of. But Loo wonʼt tell a lie. Her father beat her out of it the very first time she tried.
CHAPTER XIV.
“Dear Uncle Cradock,” said Georgie next day, for she had obtained permission long ago to address her fatherʼs cousin so, “what a very sweet girl our Eoa is!”
“I am very glad that you think so, Georgie; she reminds me very often of what my brother was at her age.”
“Oh, I do love her so. She has so much variety, and she does seem so straightforward.”
“Not only seems but is so, Georgie; at times, indeed, a little too much of it.”