"What do you propose to do, then?" I asked. "To get their consent?"
"Just stick to it," he said.
"You think they'll give way?"
"They'll have to, in the end," he affirmed gravely, and continued in a
colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper. "It's just their
respectability they care about, that's all. If they were fond of her, or
she of them, it would be another thing altogether. But she's different to
all the others, and they've never hit it off, she and them, among
themselves. Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss
Olive, for instance."
"Do they?" I said, in astonishment. I had been romantically picturing
Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this
new light.
"She never got on with 'em, somehow," Banks said. "Anyway, not when they
were alone. Always rows of one sort or another. They couldn't understand
her, of course, being so different to the others."
I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for
further details. His insistence on Brenda's difference from the rest of
the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was
obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it. He was,
as Miss Tattersall had said, "infatuated," but I put a more kindly
construction on the description than she had done--perhaps "enthralled"
would have been a better word.
We had come to a pause. His confidences were exhausted for the present. He
had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda
and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation. I
preferred that _he_ should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather
obliquely.
"Well!" he remarked. "Might as well be getting on, I suppose?"