Miss Minerva replied rather unwillingly. “My name is Frances. Don’t call me Fanny!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too absurd to be endured! What does the mere sound of Fanny suggest? A flirting, dancing creature—plump and fair, and playful and pretty!” She went to the looking-glass, and pointed disdainfully to the reflection of herself. “Sickening to think of,” she said, “when you look at that. Call me Frances—a man’s name, with only the difference between an i and an e. No sentiment in it; hard, like me. Well, what was it you didn’t like to say of yourself?”
Carmina dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s no use asking me what I do see, or don’t see, in my aunt,” she answered. “I am afraid we shall never be—what we ought to be to each other. When she came to that concert, and sat by me and looked at me—” She stopped, and shuddered over the recollection of it.
Miss Minerva urged her to go on—first, by a gesture; then by a suggestion: “They said you fainted under the heat.”
“I didn’t feel the heat. I felt a horrid creeping all over me. Before I looked at her, mind!—when I only knew that somebody was sitting next to me. And then, I did look round. Her eyes and my eyes flashed into each other. In that one moment, I lost all sense of myself as if I was dead. I can only tell you of it in that way. It was a dreadful surprise to me to remember it—and a dreadful pain—when they brought me to myself again. Though I do look so little and so weak, I am stronger than people think; I never fainted before. My aunt is—how can I say it properly?—hard to get on with since that time. Is there something wicked in my nature? I do believe she feels in the same way towards me. Yes; I dare say it’s imagination, but it’s as bad as reality for all that. Oh, I am sure you are right—she does want to keep Ovid out of my way!”
“Because she doesn’t like you?” said Miss Minerva. “Is that the only reason you can think of?”
“What other reason can there be?”
The governess summoned her utmost power of self-restraint. She needed it, even to speak of the bare possibility of Carmina’s marriage to Ovid, as if it was only a matter of speculative interest to herself.
“Some people object to marriages between cousins,” she said. “You are cousins. Some people object to marriages between Catholics and Protestants. You are a Catholic—” No! She could not trust herself to refer to him directly; she went on to the next sentence. “And there might be some other reason,” she resumed.