“And how about Lottie and that young Trannel?”
“We can’t leave him out, very well. I wish we could. I don’t like him.”
“There’s nothing easier than not asking him, if you don’t want him.”
“Yes, there is, when you’ve got a girl like Lottie to deal with. Quite likely she would ask him herself. We must take him because we can’t leave her.”
“Yes, I reckon,” the judge acquiesced.
“I’m glad,” Mrs. Kenton said, after a moment, “that it isn’t Ellen he’s after; it almost reconciles me to his being with Lottie so much. I only wonder he doesn’t take to Ellen, he’s so much like that—”
She did not say out what was in her mind, but her husband knew. “Yes, I’ve noticed it. This young Breckon was quite enough so, for my taste. I don’t know what it is that just saves him from it.”
“He’s good. You could tell that from the beginning.”
They went off upon the situation that, superficially or subliminally, was always interesting them beyond anything in the world, and they did not openly recur to Mrs. Kenton’s plan for the day till they met their children at breakfast. It was a meal at which Breckon and Trammel were both apt to join them, where they took it at two of the tables on the broad, seaward piazza of the hotel when the weather was fine. Both the young men now applauded her plan, in their different sorts. It was easily arranged that they should go by train and not by tram from The Hague. The train was chosen, and Mrs. Kenton, when she went to her room to begin the preparations for a day’s pleasure which constitute so distinctly a part of its pain, imagined that everything was settled. She had scarcely closed the door behind her when Lottie opened it and shut it again behind her.
“Mother,” she said, in the new style of address to which she was habituating Mrs. Kenton, after having so long called her momma, “I am not going with you.”