“I’m much obliged, but I don’t happen to be interested. I have seen too many persons apparently moved by them already. What I want to know is, is Jack Purchase going to be moved by them for ever.”
Audrey had never looked away from my face. Although she might not have been aware of it, in her voice there came a touch of anxiety.
“Norah, you’re not fond of Mr Carter, are you?”
“Well—in a kind of a way.”
“In a kind of a way? What kind of a way? Remember, child, that what is sport to you may be—something else to me.”
I was in a mischievous frame of mind. Each moment the mood was growing on me. What is more, my courage had returned. When I thought of what I had suffered at the hands of those four girls, and realised that now an opportunity had come—though goodness only knew whence, or how, or why!—to pay them back some of their own coin, an imp of malice seemed to enter into me, so that I did not care what I did or said. Ignoring Audrey’s evident earnestness I tried to seem as indifferent as I could.
“I don’t like him as much as I do Jack Purchase.”
“Don’t you, indeed!” retorted Doris, still with her face upturned. “What an altogether delightful person you seem to have suddenly become—such a storehouse of all the sisterly virtues. You have my permission to like Mr Purchase as much as you please; and he is at liberty to like you—if he is that sort of person.”
“It’s ridiculous!” cried Lilian, in that vicious way of hers. “Norah is nothing but a great, ungainly, awkward gawk. She always has been, and always will be. She is as little likely to appeal to a decent man as one of Barnum’s freaks. The only kind of person to whom she is likely to commend herself is such a monstrosity as Crooked Ben.”
When she said that, I went hot all over. I made up my mind that I would show her no mercy, at any rate.