“Of course not. I should have told you if he had.”
“Whose fault is it?”
Norma made a gesture of impatience. “My fault, if you like. I don't lay traps to catch him. I don't keep him dangling about me, and I don't flatter his vanities or make appeal to his senses, I suppose. I can't do it.”
“Don't behave like a fool, Norma,” said Mrs. Hardacre, rapping her book with a paper-knife. “You have got to marry him. You know you have. Your father and I are coming to the end of things. You ought to have married years ago, and when one thinks of the chances you have missed, it makes one mad. Here have we been pinching and scraping—”
“And borrowing and mortgaging,” Norma interjected.
“—to give you a brilliant position,” Mrs. Hardacre continued, unheeding the interruption, “and you cast all our efforts in our teeth. It's sheer ingratitude. Why you threw over Lord Wyniard I could never make out.”
“You seem to forget that, after all, there is a physical side to marriage,” said Norma, with a little shudder of disgust.
“I hate indelicacy in young girls,” said Mrs. Hardacre, freezingly. “One would think you had been brought up in a public house.”
“Then let us avoid indelicate subjects,” retorted Norma, opening the first book to her hand. “Where is papa?”
“Oh, how should I know?” said Mrs. Hardacre, irritably.