"It would have been kind if someone had warned her."
"Warned whom?"
"Innes. It isn't very nice to have your teeth kicked in in public."
She realised that Beau was sick with rage. Never before had she seen her even out of temper, and now she was so angry that she could hardly talk.
"But how could I have done that?" she asked reasonably, dismayed to be taken personally to task for something that she considered none of her business. "It would have been disloyal to mention it before Miss Hodge had announced her decision. For all I knew she might have altered that decision; when I left her it was still possible that she might see things from-" She stopped, realising where she was headed. But Beau too had realised. She turned her head sharply to look at Miss Pym.
"Oh. You argued with her about it. You didn't approve of her choice, then?"
"Of course not." She looked at the angry young face so near her own and decided to be frank. "You might as well know, Beau, that no one approves. The Staff feel about it very much as you do. Miss Hodge is an old friend of mine, and I owe her a great deal, and admire her, but where this appointment is concerned she is 'on her own. I have been desolated ever since I first heard of it, I would do anything to reverse it, to waken up tomorrow and find that it is just a bad dream; but as to warning anyone-" She lifted her hand in a gesture of helplessness.
Beau had gone back to glaring at the water. "A clever woman like you could have thought of something," she muttered.
The "clever woman" somehow made Beau of a sudden very young and appealing; it was not like the confident and sophisticated Beau to look for help or to think of her very ordinary Pym self as clever. She was after all a child; a child raging and hurt at the wrong that had been done her friend. Lucy had never liked her so well.
"Even a hint," Beau went on, muttering at the water. "Even a suggestion that there might be someone else in the running. Anything to warn her. To make the shock less shattering. To put her on her guard, so that she wasn't wide open. It had to be punishment, but it needn't have been a massacre. You could have sacrificed a little scruple in so good a cause, couldn't you?"