“Poor thing! I wonder what it feels like to be so great a fool as that!” said Mrs. Darcy, with a sort of lenient curiosity. “I declare that I should like to try for the hundredth part of a minute!”
“She meant to nurse him!” ejaculates Lavinia, with a pregnant smile. “Poor man! If he knew what he had escaped!”
“And now, what next?” asks Susan, spreading out her delicate, hardworking hands, and shaking her head.
“‘What next?’ as the tadpole said when his tail dropped off!” cries Daphne, pertly—a remark which, calling their parent’s attention to the edified and cock-eared interest of her innocents, leads to their instant dispersal and flight over the place towards the pre-luncheon wash-pot, which they hoped to have indefinitely postponed. When they are out of sight and earshot.
“You came to tell me something?” Mrs. Darcy says, with an entire change of tone. “Though I am not in the habit of watching Rupert and Lavy from an upper chamber, like those graceless brats, I know what it is.”
“Then I may spare myself the trouble of telling you,” answers the girl, in a key of constrained and artificial playfulness.
Her friend’s kind eyes, worn, yet with the look of a deep, serene contentment underlying their surface fatigue, look at her with a compassionate interrogation.
“Are you doing it to please yourself?” she asks in a low voice, yet not hesitatingly.
“Whom else?”
“It is a motive that has so very seldom guided you,” replies the elder woman, with an enveloping look of motherly solicitude. “And in this kind of case it is the only one that is of the least value; it is the one occasion in life in which it is one’s bounden duty to be absolutely selfish!”