“No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?”
“How did your sisters take it?”
Dan gave a rueful laugh. “It seemed to be rather a popular move with them.”
“I will see your mother first,” said the father.
He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a little later Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.
He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness. “It's no use pretending that I'm not a pretty large plurality here,” he said to Minnie.
“Oh, I'm so glad you came!” she cried, with a kindness which was as real as if it had been more sincere.
“Do you think mother will feel it much?” asked Dan anxiously, as he went upstairs with Eunice.
“Well, she'll hate to lose a correspondent—such a regular one,” said Eunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, she laughed the rest of the way to their mother's room.
The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs. Mavering's life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their peculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some very marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited characteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side, were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and her mother's father, had these qualities in the same combination.