“I cannot remain to listen to it,” she repeated, and stooped to pick up a pin.
“Oh, do remain, mummie! Don’t behave like the haughty and hard-hearted mamma of primitive fiction; she is such an old-fashioned person. Do remain and be a nice, reasonable, up-to-date mummie: it will save such a lot of trouble.”
“You don’t seem to realise what you are talking of throwing over!”
Mrs. Daye, in an access of indignation, came as far back as the piano.
“Going down to dinner before the wives of the Small Cause Court! What a worldly lady it is!”
“I wish,” Mrs. Daye ejaculated mentally, “that I had been brought up to manage daughters.” What she said aloud, with the effect of being forced to do so, was that Rhoda had also apparently forgotten that her sister Lettice was to come out next year. Before the gravity of this proposition Mrs. Daye sank into the nearest chair. And the expense, with new frocks for Darjiling, would be really——
“All the arguments familiar to the pages of the Family Herald,” the girl retorted, a dash of bitterness in her amusement, “‘with a little store of maxims, preaching down a daughter’s heart!’ Aren’t you ashamed, mummie! But you needn’t worry about that. I’ll go back to England and live with Aunt Jane: she dotes on me. Or I’ll enter the Calcutta Medical College and qualify as a lady-doctor. I shouldn’t like the cutting up, though—I really shouldn’t.”
“Rhoda, tu me fais mal! If you could only be serious for five minutes together. I suppose you have some absurd idea that Mr. Ancram is not sufficiently—demonstrative. But that will all come in due time, dear.”
The girl laughed so uncontrollably that Mrs. Daye suspected herself of an unconscious witticism, and reflected a compromising smile.
“You think I could win his affections afterwards. Oh! I should despair of it. You have no idea how coy he is, mummie!”