SCENE.--THREE WEEKS LATER. BREAKFAST TABLE AT DARKGLADE VICARAGE,
MR. AVELAND AND EUPHRASIA READING THEIR LETTERS. THREE LITTLE
CHILDREN EATING BREAD AND MILK.
E. There! Mary has got the house at Brompton off her hands and can
come for good on the 11th. That is the greatest possible comfort.
She wants to bring her piano; it has a better tone than ours.
MR. A. Certainly! Little Miss Hilda there will soon be strumming
her scales on the old one, and Mary and Cis will send me to sleep in
the evening with hers.
E. Oh!
MR. A. Why, Phrasie, what's the matter?
E. This is a blow! Cicely is only coming to be bridesmaid, and
then going back to board at Kensington and go on with her studies.
MR. A. To board? All alone?
E. Oh! that's the way with young ladies!
MR. A. Mary cannot have consented.
E. Have you done, little folks? Then say grace, Hilda, and run out
till the lesson bell rings. Yes, poor Mary, I am afraid she thinks
all that Cecilia decrees is right; or if she does not naturally
believe so, she is made to.
MR. A. Come, come, Phrasie, I always thought Mary a model mother.
E. So did I, and so she was while the children were small, except
that they were more free and easy with her than was the way in our
time. And I think she is all that is to be desired to her son; but
when last I was in London, I cannot say I was satisfied, I thought
Cissy had got beyond her.
MR. A. For want of a father?
E. Not entirely. You know I could not think Charles Moldwarp quite
worthy of Mary, though she never saw it.
MR. A. Latterly we saw so little of him! He liked to spend his
holiday in mountain climbing, and Mary made her visits here alone.
E. Exactly so. Sympathy faded out between them, though she, poor
dear, never betrayed it, if she realised it, which I doubt. And as
Cissy took after her father, this may have weakened her allegiance
to her mother. At any rate, as soon as she was thought to have
outgrown her mother's teaching, those greater things, mother's
influence and culture, were not thought of, and she went to school
and had her companions and interests apart; while Mary, good soul,
filled up the vacancy with good works, and if once you get into the
swing of that sort of thing in town, there's no end to the demands
upon your time. I don't think she ever let them bore her husband.
He was out all day, and didn't want her; but I am afraid they do
bore her daughter, and absorb attention and time, so as to hinder
full companionship, till Cissy has grown up an extraneous creature,
not formed by her. Mary thinks, in her humility, dear old thing,
that it is a much superior creature; but I don't like it as well as
the old sort.
MR. A. The old barndoor hen hatched her eggs and bred up her chicks
better than the fine prize fowl. Eh?
E. So that incubator-hatched chicks, with a hot-bed instead of a
hovering wing and tender cluck-cluck, are the fashion! I was in
hopes that coming down to the old coop, with no professors to run
after, and you to lead them both, all would right itself, but it
seems my young lady wants more improving.
MR. A. Well, my dear, it must be mortifying to a clever girl to
have her studies cut short.
E. Certainly; but in my time we held that studies were subordinate
to duties; and that there were other kinds of improvement than in
model-drawing and all the rest of it.
MR. A. It will not be for long, and Cissy will find the people, or
has found them, and Mary will accept them.
E. If her native instinct objects, she will be cajoled or bullied
into seeing with Cissy's eyes.
MR. A. Well, Euphrasia, my dear, let us trust that people are the
best judges of their own affairs, and remember that the world has
got beyond us. Mary was always a sensible, right-minded girl, and I
cannot believe her as blind as you would make out.
E. At any rate, dear papa, you never have to say to her as to me,
'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'