“It’s no use your endeavouring to palliate Norah’s conduct, Audrey—I won’t have it!—I have had too much of it already!—I don’t like the attitude you have taken up in the matter!—it doesn’t become you! Norah’s behaviour is beyond my comprehension—look at the scene last night! And now here are these men—strange men!—at this unseemly hour of the morning, demanding to see her as if they were presenting a pistol at my head. I will not keep silent and allow scandal to be brought upon my house. Tell me at once, Norah, who is this person who calls himself the Duke of Chelmsford?”
“He is the Duke of Chelmsford, mamma.”
“How do you know? And how did you become acquainted with him, if he is—you, of all the people in the world?”
“He introduced himself to me last night.”
“Introduced himself to you!—a man in his position!—to you! Where were those other men that such a thing should have been possible?”
I sighed, at least I made a noise which I suppose may be described as a sigh, though it has always seemed to me to be rather a poetic word to apply to the sort of gasping sound one makes when one feels that other people are just a trifle stupid.
“It would take me a good time to explain, mamma, and then perhaps you wouldn’t understand.”
“Indeed, though that’s a remark which no girl ought to make to her mother, I daresay it’s true enough; the whole thing’s beyond my understanding. Ever since yesterday afternoon I’ve been asking myself if the whole world’s gone mad. And now that I look at you I ask myself more than ever. No man has ever seen anything in you except two eyes and a nose, and now what they think they see in you all of a sudden is beyond me altogether. What you say about her having changed, Audrey, is just nonsense, except it’s changed for the worse—unless you wish to insinuate that my eyesight’s failing me. She’s always been a plain girl—the only one of my family!—and she’s a plain woman—without even that kind of plainness which is interesting. And what you wish me to understand by talking about her having changed sufficiently to account for the behaviour of those men, as I say, unless I’m going blind, it’s balderdash you’re talking. She’s a fright, just that, and nothing more; and it’s a bad day when I, her mother, that never had a child except her that wasn’t fit for framing—have to say it.”
During the utterance of these very outspoken remarks, I knew—although I was not looking—that Audrey was making signs to mamma to be a little careful in her choice of words; signs which, apparently, mamma preferred to ignore—feeling, possibly, that, under the circumstances, to spare my feelings was to spoil the child. When mamma had quite finished then I did turn towards Audrey, and when I caught her eyes she smiled, there was no mistake about her being a picture well worth framing!
“Never mind what mamma says,” she whispered.