Lady Marjorie was artistically arranging some flowers in a bowl. She looked just as nice in her morning blouse as she did in a Parisian toilette. When she had finished, she came over to the couch where Celia was sitting.
“Girlie,” she said, “I want to talk to you seriously.”
Celia looked up in surprise.
“I have been watching you for the past few months, and I don’t quite know what to make of you. When you became engaged to David Salmon, I supposed it was because you were in love with him; but it seems to me now that you are not quite happy in your engagement. Now listen, Celia. Either you mean to marry him, or you do not. If you do, why have you this unnatural desire for procrastination? I consider, honestly speaking, that you have kept him waiting an unreasonable length of time. If, on the other hand, you do not intend to marry him, the sooner you break off the engagement the better, both for his sake and your own. Perhaps, during your long courtship, you have found out that he and you are not so suited to each other as you thought you were, and yet you do not like to hurt his feelings by telling him so? You long for freedom, but you are reluctant to strike the blow that will set you free. Girlie, darling, tell me the truth as it is in your heart. Am I right?”
She sank on to the couch, and looked into the girl’s face with a tender solicitude in her kindly blue eyes.
Celia’s heart gave a leap. How exactly had her chaperon diagnosed the case, and how she despised herself that it should be so! The blood rushed to her cheeks, as, hiding her face in Souvie’s silky coat, she murmured, so low that it could scarcely be heard, the single monosyllable, “Yes!”
Lady Marjorie did not exhibit surprise. She had guessed as much for some time. But she thought, and did not hesitate to say, that Celia had done very wrong in allowing the engagement to continue, when on her part she did not intend it to terminate in marriage. She came to the conclusion that the girl had not possessed the courage to face the question out; she had always put away the thought of her marriage with David as a disagreeable necessity of the future; she had dissembled with her own conscience.
In this she was right. Celia had given way to weakness, but she had not intentionally done wrong; and when the matter was threshed out, as Lady Marjorie was threshing it out now, she saw the magnitude of the injury she had done to her fiancé.
One thing was certain: there must be no more equivocation.
“You will have to give David his congé as nicely as you can,” her chaperon said when it was all explained. “It will be a painful interview, of course; but it will have to be gone through, and the sooner you get it over the better.”