“Nor I. It’s rather odd that we should be of the same mind upon that subject. There, now you look a little better; though, I tell you again, that you’re a difficult child to dress. Yet it might be worth one’s while to fashion for you a mode of your own. You are so—very splendid.”
“Audrey, I do wish that you wouldn’t laugh at me!”
“I repeat that I am not laughing. I don’t know, Norah O’Brady, if you are aware how excellent an opportunity you are about to have to show how badly you can behave. One girl—five men, each of them wishing the others were in Heaven. What a chance you’ll have of trampling on what they flatter themselves are their tenderest feelings. If you’re a sister of mine, trample on them, Norah, an you love me.”
“I’ll try.”
“At least, do try. Let me whisper in your ear. Above all, trample—with your heaviest tramp—on Basil Carter—not only on his feelings, but, if opportunity offers, on his very self. I’m much afraid that he’s the biggest gander of them all—and, Norah, I didn’t think so once.”
CHAPTER XV.
TRAMPLING UPON FIVE
I cannot truthfully say that I felt exactly proud of myself as I marched down to the drawing-room. I met Eveleen coming up as I went down, and she looked flurried; then I met Lilian, and she looked more flurried still; and, lastly, at the foot of the stairs, mamma. Something told me that all three of them had been in the drawing-room to try to bring those men to a consciousness of shame. There was that in their bearing which hinted that they had not succeeded. Eveleen suggested a desire to shake me; Lilian an inclination to bite my nose off; and as for mamma, she received me in a state of fluster which spoke volumes.
“You understand, Norah, that I have forbidden you to disgrace me, and I forbid you again!”
I was just in a mood to melt, and had mamma adopted another tone, or even appealed to me to leave her Major Tibbet, I am nearly sure I should have melted. But when she spoke to me like that, of course, needles came out all over me, and I smiled as sweetly as I knew how.
“Disgrace you, mamma? Why it was not necessary to forbid me to do that. I am sure you have brought me up too carefully to think it.”