There was such hopeless bewilderment in his repetition of the name that she felt the need of enlightening him.
“I am stupid to-day; probably you have never heard of them. I was forgetting how little you know of the life here of late.”
“You need not remind me that I was a neglectful brother,” he answered, in a key of such profound regret that she took refuge from her dangerous pity of him in explanation.
“They are, in a way, connections of mine—at least, he is; his name was Ransome before he married her. He was, like the rest of the family, not a very shining light, I believe, but now he has ranged himself, I suppose, and she is very philanthropic and platformy and religious.”
He received the blow in total silence, being not one of those who cry out when they are hurt. When at last he spoke, it was with a measured impartiality, which sounded to himself grossly overdone.
“I suppose that you are the best judge of what makes for your happiness.”
“One ought not to think of one’s own happiness,” she answered, in her “nicest” manner; then with a flash of self-ridicule for serving up so coarsely dressed a dish of “goodness” to one who knew her much too well to swallow it, she added with a laugh, whose hysteric quality, if half affected, was also half natural—“at least, so Mrs. Slammer tells her husband when she whips off her cordon bleu half an hour before dinner to see the Monument.”
Her mental comment on her own speech—for she was not one with whom thought and word ever flowed parallel—ran thus: “What atrocious taste to be making bad jests to poor Felicity’s brother on the day of the funeral! but if I am not flippant, God knows what I may say or do!”
He stood before her absolutely still, not moving a muscle at her dull pleasantry.
“Have you thought it well over? Are you quite sure that it would not be better for you to come back with us to Stillington to-morrow?”