Mrs. Glanville broke into a horrified laugh. “Camilla make up! My dear child, wait till you see her.”
“I shall not have long to wait”—very lugubriously.
“Well, as you have not much time, I must hurry on. She is, as I say, much older than my brother.”
“Yes.”
“And she never could have been handsome.”
“Poor, poor fellow!” replied the girl, in a tone of the most good-hearted compassion. “But, no doubt, he has his consolations.”
Her hostess looked down upon the peculiarly innocent face at her knee with an expression in which the proportion of amusement to aghastness was considerably less than it had been at some of her protégée’s utterances.
“Bonnybell,” she said, very gravely, “I really dare not ask what you mean!” Then reflecting that the few minutes left her would be scarcely long enough to correct a moral standpoint on which three months’ intercourse had effected so little real change, she hastened on. “Camilla is a right down good woman, but her manners leave something to be desired. In point of fact, she is a good deal soured—embittered is perhaps the better word—by having no children. Unluckily, she is one of those baby-maniacs, who never can reconcile themselves to being childless. I cannot personally understand the feeling; there seems to me something animal about it.”
“I am very fond of children,” replied Bonnybell, thoughtfully; “but when I marry, I shall have only two.”
“You will have what God pleases to send you, I suppose,” rejoined Mrs. Glanville, sharply.