“I don’t want you to think, momma,” said the girl, “that I didn’t know about her hair, or that I don’t see how silly she is. But it’s all the more to his credit if he can be so good to her, and admire her. Would you like him better if he despised her?”
Mrs. Kenton felt both the defiance and the secret shame from which it sprang in her daughter’s words; and she waited for a moment before she answered, “I would like to be sure he didn’t!”
“If he does, and if he hides it from her, it’s the same as if he didn’t; it’s better. But you all wish to dislike him.”
“We don’t wish to dislike him, Ellen, goodness knows. But I don’t think he would care much whether we disliked him or not. I am sure your poor father and I would be only too glad to like him.”
“Lottie wouldn’t,” said Ellen, with a resentment her mother found pathetic, it was so feeble and aimless.
“Lottie doesn’t matter,” she said. She could not make out how nearly Ellen was to sharing the common dislike, or how far she would go in fortifying herself against it. She kept with difficulty to her negative frankness, and she let the girl leave the room with a fretful sigh, as if provoked that her mother would not provoke her further. There were moments when Mrs. Kenton believed that Ellen was sick of her love, and that she would pluck it out of her heart herself if she were left alone. She was then glad Bittridge had come, so that Ellen might compare with the reality the counterfeit presentment she had kept in her fancy; and she believed that if she could but leave him to do his worst, it would be the best for Ellen.
In the evening, directly after dinner, Bittridge sent up his name for Mrs. Kenton. The judge had remained to read his paper below, and Lottie and Boyne had gone to some friends in another apartment. It seemed to Mrs. Kenton a piece of luck that she should be able to see him alone, and she could not have said that she was unprepared for him to come in, holding his theatre-tickets explanatorily in his hand, or surprised when he began:
“Mrs. Kenton, my mother’s got a bad headache, and I’ve come to ask a favor of you. She can’t use her ticket for to-night, and I want you to let Miss Ellen come with me. Will you?”
Bittridge had constituted himself an old friend of the whole family from the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she felt, she was not averse to what he proposed. Her fear was that Ellen would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test of her real feeling for Bittridge. “I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge,” she said, with a severity which was a preliminary of the impartiality she meant to use with Ellen.
“Well, that’s right,” he answered, and while she went to the girl’s room he remained examining the details of the drawing-room decorations in easy security, which Mrs. Kenton justified on her return.