"Wait and see! Good-night, dear." The "dear" was rather perfunctory. And it was not to correct it to tenderness that Judith turned back in the doorway and reclosed it from within. "I want to know what you meant by 'the usual thing,'" she said, and waited.
"I thought you said you didn't think it mattered."
"I don't think it does. But I want to know what you meant by it, just the same."
The return into the room to ask the question added to its weight somehow. Sibyl might have answered more forcibly and less pertly had it been asked during conversation. "I should have thought, after the Honourable Stephen, that that went without saying."
"'After the Honourable Stephen'!... Sibyl!" There is growing resentment in the handsome woman's voice of protest, and a slight flinching in her sister's manner recognizes it. She speaks uncomfortably.
"Well, what would you have me say? You know quite well, Ju, that the madre thinks so too. What is the use of pretending?"
Judith's colour is heightened as she closes the door to prevent someone hearing in the passage—her maid perhaps or her sister's. "I see no use in pretending, Sib. If you and mamma are going to say spiteful and malicious things, you had better speak them out.... Yes, it is spiteful and malicious to try to make out that there was anything between me and Stephen Lyell; it is simply wicked to use the word flirtation.... No—I know you have not actually used it—but it's the same thing. It was that woman entirely! And you know it!"
"I should have felt as she did. Besides, Lady Di Lyell's no fool. Look how you had him to yourself all day long ... oh yes!—I know what you are going to say. Perhaps there wasn't. But some people can get on perfectly well without any love-making. I think that way's the worst; it's insidious and hypocritical. Yes, Judith!—if you are going to flirt with a married man, I would sooner you did it above-board." Notice Sibyl's elisions, and how easily understood they seemed to be. Sisters' intercourse is based on concurrent consciousness of the actual; sometimes admitted, sometimes concealed. These two had harboured theirs from the nursery, usually finding speech for them. In the present case they had never spoken quite openly, though each knew the other knew of her knowledge, and pointed allusions to flirtations with married men had been perfectly well understood.
Judith has been keeping back a great deal of anger—she has self-control in plenty—to affect a certain patronage of a younger sister; albeit she has only a couple of years more to her half of the fifty they share between them. "Sib dear!" she says. "You are entirely absurd—quite childish. If her jealous ladyship wasn't secure against me and poor good, honourable Stephen, where is married bliss to find security? Unless men and women are never to be friends at all."
"Nobody objects to it that I know of. Only not one at a time. You know the difference that makes as well as I do—as well as everyone does."