The Making of a Prig Part 30

Your place is the world, Kitty, the great world! There cannot be any work for you to do in a home like yours."

"There is always plenty to do in the village, and n.o.body to do it,"

said Katharine. "I have considered the matter thoroughly, Aunt Alicia, and my mind is quite made up. Anybody can do my work up here in London; you know that is so."

"Indeed, you are mistaken," said her aunt, vehemently. It seemed particularly hard that her favourite protegee should have deserted her principles, just as she had been driven to the last limit of endurance by her own daughter. "Every woman must do her own work, and no one else can do it for her."

"Then why do you always say the labour market is so overcrowded?"

asked Marion, making a mischievous application of the knowledge she had so unwillingly absorbed. But she was not heeded.

"It is the ma.s.s we have to consider, not the individual," continued the Honourable Mrs. Keeley, as though she were addressing the room from a platform. "It is for lesser women than ourselves to look after the home and the parish; there is a far wider sphere reserved for such as you and I. It would be a perfect scandal if you were to throw yourself away on the narrowness of the domestic circle."

Katharine felt a hysterical desire to laugh, which she controlled with difficulty. She spoke very humbly, instead.

"It must be my own fault, if I have allowed you to think all these things about me," she said. "There is nothing great reserved for me; I am just a complete failure, and that is the end of all my ambition and all my conceit. I wish some one had told me I was conceited, before I got so bad."

The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was silenced at last. None of her experience of working gentlewomen helped her to meet the present situation. A woman with a great future before her had obviously no right to be humble. But Marion realised gleefully that she had gained a new and unexpected ally.

"I always said you were much too jolly to belong to mamma's set," she observed; at which the angered feelings of her mother compelled her to seek comfort in solitude, and she made some excuse for retiring to her boudoir, and left the two rebels together. They looked at one another and broke into mutual merriment. But Marion laughed the loudest,--a fact that she herself was the first to appreciate.

"Kitty," she said suddenly, growing grave, "I am so sorry, dear!

What's up, and who has been treating you badly?"

She strolled away immediately to pour out tea, and Katharine had time to recover from surprise at her unusual penetration.

"How did you know?" she asked, slowly.

"I guessed, because--oh, you looked like it, or something! Don't ask me to give a reason for anything I say, _please_. It isn't my business, of course, and I don't want to know a thing about it if you would rather not tell; only, I'm sorry if you're cut up, that's all.

Did you chuck him, or did it never get so far as that? There, I really don't want you to tell me about it. Of course, he was much older than you, and much wickeder, and he flirted atrociously with you and you were taken in by him, you poor little innocent dear! I know all about it, and the way they get hold of girls like you who are not up to their wiles. He was married, too, of course? They always are, the worst ones."

It was too much trouble to correct her a.s.sumptions, and Katharine allowed her to go on. After all, her sympathy was genuine, if it was a little crudely expressed.

"I shouldn't think any more about him, if I were you," continued Marion. "They're not worth it, any of them; go and get another, and snap your fingers at the first. You're not tied to one, as I am."

"No," said Katharine, scalding herself with mouthfuls of boiling tea.

"I'm not."

"I know I would give anything to get rid of mine," said Marion sorrowfully. "May you never know the awful monotony of being engaged!"

"I don't fancy I ever shall," observed Katharine.

"Always the same writing on the breakfast table," sighed Marion; "always the same face on the back seat of the carriage; always the same photograph all over the house,--oh, it's maddening! You wouldn't be able to stand it for a day, Kitty!"

"Perhaps not," said Katharine. "Then your engagement is publicly announced now?"

"I should rather think so! I am tired of being congratulated by a lot of idiots, who don't even take the trouble to find out whether I want to be married or not. And then, the boys! Bobby is going to shoot himself, he says; but of course Bobby always says that. And Jack has gone to South Africa; I don't exactly know why, except that every one goes to South Africa when there isn't any particular reason for staying in town. And Tommy--you remember Tommy, don't you? He was my best boy for ever so long; I rather liked Tommy. Well, he has gone and married that stupid Ethel Humphreys, and he always said she _pinched_.

I know why he did it, too. He was being objectionably serious, one day, and said he would do anything on earth for me; so I asked him to go and marry mamma, because then I should get eight hundred a year.

And he didn't like it a bit; Tommy always was ridiculously hot-tempered. Oh, dear, I'm sick of it all! I believe you're the only person I know, who hasn't congratulated me."

"Apparently, you do not consider yourself a subject for congratulation," said Katharine, smiling faintly.

"Oh, you're not like all the others, and I should like to be congratulated by you. You would mean what you said, anyhow."

"I certainly should," exclaimed Katharine.

"How earnestly you said that! It's frightfully nice of you to care so much, though. I was telling Paul what a good sort you were, the other day, and he quite agreed."

"Wasn't it rather dull for him?"

"Oh, no, I'm sure it wasn't; he takes a tremendous interest in you; he says you are the cleverest woman he knows, and the pluckiest. He does, really!"

"I have no doubt of it. He has always thought me clever and plucky,"

said Katharine.

"Well, it's more than he thinks about me, anyhow," said Marion ruefully. "He doesn't think I am good for anything, except to play with."

"And to fall in love with," added Katharine softly.

"Why didn't you come and meet him the other evening?" continued Marion. "He seemed so disappointed. So was I; I wanted you to come, for lots of reasons. I get so bored when I am left alone with him! I like him ever so much better if there is some one else there; and you are the only girl I know who would be safe not to flirt with him.

Bobby said, only the other day, that you were much too nice to flirt with. And girls are so mean, sometimes,--aren't they? I was really sorry when you refused."

"If you had told me the real reason for your invitation, instead of the conventional one, I might have made more effort to come," said Katharine.

"You old dear, don't be sarcastic; I never can endure sarcasm. But you will come next time, won't you? Oh, dear, I am forgetting all about your own trouble; what a selfish wretch I am! Are you sure there is nothing I can do for you?"

"Nothing, thanks; at least, nothing I would let you do."

"Sure? Well, let me know if there is. Are you really very gone on him, Kitty?"

"Please don't," said Katharine.

"All right, I won't. But I wish you would try a course of boys for a time; it would make you feel so much happier. They're so fresh and harmless."

"Even when they shoot themselves?" said Katharine.

"Oh, that's only Bobby. Must you really go? You old dear, you have done me such a lot of good. What is it, Williams?"

Mr. Wilton was in the library, the man announced, and would be glad to see either Mrs. Keeley or her daughter for a moment, and he would rather not come upstairs, as he was in a hurry. Marion gave a petulant little stamp.

"Oh, send mamma to him! How like Paul, not to care which of us he sees! Just fancy, if it were Tommy, now! Stop, though, show him up here, Williams. You will be able to congratulate him, Kitty; it will put him in a good humour. Oh, nonsense! you can wait just for that, and I haven't anything to say to him that he hasn't heard hundreds of times before."

So Katharine found herself shaking hands with him once more, and congratulating him on being engaged to her cousin, Marion Keeley. She had not seen him since the night of the thunderstorm, when he had stood in the old doorway in Ess.e.x Court, with the lamplight on his face.

"You are very good; it is kind of you to take so much interest," he was saying with frigid politeness.

They were silent after that, and Marion said she was sure they must have crowds to talk about, and she would go upstairs and ask her mother about Lady Suffolk's drawing-room meeting; and they both made perfectly futile efforts to keep her in the room, and were ashamed of having made them when she had gone, and they were left to face the situation alone.

"I suppose," said Paul, with an effort, "that your holidays will soon be beginning?"

"They have begun to-day," said Katharine. "This is the first day--of my last holidays."