She takes him at his word, and continues her homely occupation. Up and down, up and down her foot goes, keeping the wheel in motion; prick, prick, prick, the needle travels with its quick, regular stabs. If, as I have said, the process of bending over work on a July afternoon is heating, the consciousness that another person is watching every quiver of your eyelids, counting every breath you draw, and every displaced hair that straggles about brow or cheek, does not conduce to make it less so. The magnetic influence that sooner or later compels the eyes of the looked at to seek those of the looker, obliges Esther, after awhile, to raise hers—reluctant and protesting—to Robert's.
"I wish my mother could see you!" he says, with a smile of placid happiness. Mr. Brandon carries his mother metaphorically upon his back, almost as much as pious Æneas did the old Anchises literally. Esther suspends her employment for a moment.
"I beg your pardon; this machine makes such a noise that I did not catch what you said."
"I was only wishing that mother could see you now."
"It is a pleasure she enjoys pretty frequently. Why now particularly?"
"She would see how thrifty and housewifely you can be."
"I am glad she does not, then," answers the girl, drily, beginning to work again faster than ever, and flushing with annoyance; "she would form a most erroneous estimate of me. I dislike particularly to be found by people in one of my rare paroxysms of virtue; they take it for my normal state, and judge and expect of me accordingly."
"I shall tell her that, at all events, my judgment of you was nearer the truth than hers," says Robert, triumphantly.
Esther laughs awkwardly.
"I don't know whether you are aware of it, but you are conveying to my mind the idea that your mother has been pronouncing a very unfavourable verdict upon me and my character."