It was not unnatural perhaps that the after effect upon Virginia of Benson's declaration was less pronounced than upon himself. Her active anger was of brief duration only, and she soon forgave him his unlucky utterances in remembering his real kindness. She would have liked him to know this; but she was sensible it would be unsafe to show it, and after all, a marked but kindly reserve was only a reasonable precaution. She was sorry for him, and his restrained manner in her presence only tended to deepen her feeling of pity; yet she considered him both a foolish and presumptuous young man.
In the first stress of her emotion she had meditated radical and salutary treatment of him. She had even thought of asking him to retire from the management of the estate; but she had decided that this would be a needless severity. When they met she was ceremoniously kind, but either Jane or Stephen was present. At first Benson had been rather inclined to smile at this; it struck him as being such a distinctly feminine maneuver; but the chaperonage when it was firmly persisted in, ended by becoming rather galling; it argued such a lack of confidence, as well as a fixed unwillingness to allow him to ever again revert to the subject which he had most at heart.
Virginia had found that even Dr. Long's select academy, with its modest fees for tuition, was out of the question; and was forced to send Stephen to the public school. At first Sam West drove him into town each morning, returning for him in the afternoon, and Benson pointed out to Virginia that when the winter actually set in these drives would be rather a hardship for the boy, and proposed that he stay with him when the weather was severe.
“Oh, no, I couldn't think of that!” said Virginia. “He would be such a care to you.”
“You leave that part of it to me, Mrs. Landray,” answered the lawyer good-naturedly.
“And I should miss him dreadfully, and he might be homesick!”
“He probably will be at first; but you'll be sending him off to college presently; this will prepare you both for that time.”
“Well, perhaps, when the roads get very bad indeed.”
After his first experience in town, Stephen carried Virginia such an enthusiastic account of his host's kindness that it won from her a grateful little letter of acknowledgment and thanks.
From the start Benson exerted a certain influence over the boy that was destined to increase with his development. The lawyer was the first man he had known of his own class; all his short life had been passed among women, they had been his companions and friends; and he slowly abandoned the reserve with which he had first met Benson's advances, until finally he talked to him almost as freely as he would have talked to Virginia herself.