The Young Step-Mother Part 57

'Well,' said Mr. Kendal, 'you know I think that your uncle's apparent indifference may be his fas.h.i.+on of being your best friend.'

'I'd take it like suns.h.i.+ne in May from a stranger, and be proud to disappoint him,' said Ulick, 'but to call himself my uncle, and use my mother's own eyes to look at me that way, that's the stroke! and to think that I'm only striving to harden myself by force of habit to be exactly like him! I'd rather enlist to-morrow, if that would not be his greatest triumph!' he cried, pressing his hands hard on his temple. 'It is very childish, but I could forgive him anything but using my mother's eyes that way!'

'You will yet rejoice in the likeness,' said Mr. Kendal. 'You must believe in more than you can trace, and when your perseverance has conquered his esteem, the rest will follow.'

'Follow? The rest, as you call it, would go before at home,' sighed Ulick, wearily. 'Esteem is like fame! what I want begins without it, and lives as well with or without it!'

'Perhaps,' said his friend, 'Mr. Goldsmith would think it weakness to show preference to a relation before it was earned.'

'Ah then,' cried Ulick, in a quaint Irish tone, 'Heaven have mercy on the little children!'

'Yes, the doctrine can only be consistently held by a solitary man.'

'Where would we be but for inconsistency?' exclaimed Ulick.

'I do not like to hear you talk in that manner,' said Sophy.

'Inconsistency is mere weakness.'

'Ah! then you are the dangerous character,' said Ulick, with a droll gesture of sheltering himself behind the chair.

'I did not call myself consistent, I wish I were,' she said, gravely.

'How she must love the French!' returned Ulick, confidentially turning to her father.

'Not at all, I detest them.'

'Then you are inconsistent, for they're the very models of uncompromising consistency.'

'Yes, to bad principles,' said Sophy.

'Robespierre was a prime specimen of consistency to good principle!'

Sophy turned to her father, and with an odd dubious look, asked him, 'Is be teasing me?'

'He'd be proud to have the honour,' Ulick made answer, so that Mr.

Kendal's smile grew broad. It was the funniest thing to see Ulick sporting with Sophy's gravity, constraining her to playfulness, with something of the compulsion exercised by a large frolicsome puppy upon a sober old dog of less size and strength.

'I do not like to see powers wasted on paradox,' she said, even as the grave senior might roll up his lip and snarl.

'I'm in earnest, Sophy,' pursued Ulick, changing his note to eagerness.

'La grande nation herself finds that logic was her bane. Consistency was never made for man! Why where would this world be if it did not go two ways at once?'

Sophy did laugh at this Irish version of the centripetal and centrifugal forces, but she held out. 'The earth describes a circle; I like straight lines.'

'Much we shall have of the right direction, unless we are content to turn right about face,' said Ulick. 'The best path of life is but a herring-bone pattern.'

'What does he know of herring-boning?' asked Mrs. Kendal, coming in at the moment, with a white cashmere cloak folded picturesquely over her delicate blue silk. Ulick in a moment a.s.sumed a less careless att.i.tude, as he answered--

'I found my poetical ill.u.s.tration on the motion of the earth too much for her, so I descended to the herring-bone as more suited to her capacity.'

'There he is, mamma,' said Sophy, 'pleading that consistency is the most ruinous thing in the world.'

'I thought as much,' said Albinia. 'Prometheus and his kin do most abound when Ulick's head is worst, and papa is in greatest danger of being late.'

Mr. Kendal turned round, looked at the time-piece, and marched off.

'But mamma!' continued Sophy, driving straight at her point, 'what do you think of consistency?'

'Oh, mamma!' cried Lucy, coming into the room in a flutter of white; 'there you are in your beautiful blue! Have you really put it on for the Drurys?'

Sophy bit her lip, neither pleased at the interruption, nor at the taste.

'Have you a graduated scale of dresses for all your friends, Lucy? asked Ulick.

'Everybody has, I suppose,' said Lucy.

'Ah! then I shall know how to judge how I stand in your favour. I never knew so well what the garb of friends.h.i.+p meant.'

'You must know which way her scale goes,' said Albinia, laughing at Sophy's evident affront at the frivolous turn the conversation had taken.

'That needs no asking,' quoth Ulick, 'Unadorned, adorned the most for the nearest the hearth.'

'That's all conceit,' said Lucy. 'Maybe familiarity breeds contempt.'

'No, no, when young ladies despise, they use a precision that says, "'Tis myself I care for, and not you."'

'What an observer!' cried Lucy. 'Now then, interpret my dress to-night!'

'How can you, Lucy!' muttered the scandalized Sophy.

'Well, Sophy, as you will have him to torment with philosophy this whole evening, I think you might give him a little respite,' said Lucy, good-humouredly. 'I want to know what my dress reveals to him!' and drawing up her head, where two coral pins contrasted with her dark braids, and spreading out her full white skirts and cerise tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, she threw her figure into an att.i.tude, and darted a merry challenge from her lively black eyes, while Ulick availed himself of the permission to look critically, and Sophy sank back disgusted.

'Miss Kendal can, when she is inclined, produce as much effect with her beams of the second order as with all her splendours displayed.'

'Stuff,' said Lucy.

'Stuff indeed,' more sincerely murmured Sophy.

'Say something in earnest,' said Lucy. 'You professed to tell what I thought of the people.'

'I hope you'll never put on such new white gloves where I'm the party chiefly concerned.'

'What do you mean?'

'They are a great deal too unexceptionable.'

If there were something coquettish in the manner of these two, it did not give Albinia much concern. It was in him 'only Irish;' and Fred Ferrars had made her believe that it was rather a sign of the absence of love than of its presence. She saw much more respect and interest in his mischievous attacks on Sophy's gravity, and though Lucy both pitied him and liked chattering with him, it was all the while under the secret protest that he was only a banker's clerk.