“Miss Ransome.”
Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’ hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles—the pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest goggles—from her book. She would do her duty by the expected imposition when once it was laid on her shoulders, but that she should manifest empressement or pleasure in assuming the burden so brazenly shifted by Felicity from her own to Camilla’s back would be an offence at once against truth and decency.
Though Bonnybell had heartily dreaded and disliked the idea of her change of milieu, it had never occurred to her that the introduction to her new patroness would make her feel shy. Felicity kissed her upon arriving. A fortiori, Camilla would wish to kiss her, since in Miss Ransome’s experience the less attractive a human countenance was, the more anxious it was to approach itself to one’s own. She must be prepared for this, must appear willing, if possible more than willing, to be embraced.
This had been her plan of campaign during the five-mile drive in the brougham, while clanking under the stone portico of the hall door, while passing through the evidently much-sat-in large hall, and being ushered into the morning-room opening out of it; but no sooner had her feet crossed the threshold of this latter, and seen the tall gauntness that faced her slowly rising from its seat and deliberately replacing its spectacles in their leather case, and awaiting her without one conciliatory inch of advance towards her, then, with lightning speed, she realized the impossibility of her project. Attempt to kiss that icy mask! Her buoyant step faltered, her ideas grew confused, only a hazy notion that her plan was a good one, and that she must carry out as much of it as was possible, still occupying her brain.
With merely this dim guide for her conduct, and becoming aware that she was now quite close to the grey-haired iceberg ahead, she dropped a little French curtsey, and laid a small, respectful, butterfly kiss upon the bony fingers held grudgingly out to her.
Mrs. Tancred snatched away her hand, though more in a sort of ferocious mauvaise honte than from any more hostile motive. It was so very seldom, throughout her fifty years, that any one had kissed Camilla’s hand. Edward had done so, fifteen years ago, as a graceful unmarried lad of twenty, in innocent acknowledgment of long hospitalities, and she had thereupon straightway proposed marriage to him—that marriage which he had been too young, too grateful, and too much taken aback to decline.
Was it any wonder that, having such associations with the courtesy in question, Mrs. Tancred should mark her disapprobation of it with what, to the uninitiated, might seem needless emphasis?
To Bonnybell this miscarriage of her plan of action at its very outset brought a momentary paralysis, and she stood dumbfounded, while an awkward remorse for her reception of what, though silly and misplaced, might have been a well-meant civility, impelled Camilla to make a conciliatory remark to the effect that she was afraid the tea was cold.
“I like it cold,” replied Miss Ransome, with the sweetest promptitude and the most instantaneous rally.
“You like it cold?” repeated Camilla.