MRS. COREY returned with her daughters in the early days of October,
having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after leaving Bar
Harbour. They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town
in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the
girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools,
with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up
and never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny,
the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their
inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of
life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both
nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough
looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom
their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home
to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to
distract them.
In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid
interest in their brother's affairs, which they could see weighed upon
their mother's mind after the first hours of greeting.
"Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written
a word about it," she said, shaking her head.
"What good would it have done?" asked Nanny, who was little and fair,
with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front very prettily; she
looked best in a bonnet. "It would only have worried you. He could
not have stopped Tom; you couldn't, when you came home to do it."
"I dare say papa didn't know much about it," suggested Lily. She was a
tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not quite warm enough,
and whom you always associated with wraps of different aesthetic effect
after you had once seen her.
It is a serious matter always to the women of his family when a young
man gives them cause to suspect that he is interested in some other
woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law does not enter the family; he
need not be caressed or made anything of; but the son's or brother's
wife has a claim upon his mother and sisters which they cannot deny.
Some convention of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to
like or to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however
odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something more than
an affair of sentiment. They were by no means poor, and they were not
dependent money-wise upon Tom Corey; but the mother had come, without
knowing it, to rely upon his sense, his advice in everything, and the
sisters, seeing him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly
grown to regard him as altogether their own till he should be released,
not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not approached
with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls--they believed that they
could readily have chosen a kind--might have taken him without taking
him from them; but this generosity could not be hoped for in such a
girl as Miss Lapham.
"Perhaps," urged their mother, "it would not be so bad. She seemed an
affectionate little thing with her mother, without a great deal of
character though she was so capable about some things."
"Oh, she'll be an affectionate little thing with Tom too, you may be
sure," said Nanny. "And that characterless capability becomes the most
in tense narrow-mindedness. She'll think we were against her from the
beginning."
"She has no cause for that," Lily interposed, "and we shall not give
her any."
"Yes, we shall," retorted Nanny. "We can't help it; and if we can't,
her own ignorance would be cause enough."
"I can't feel that she's altogether ignorant," said Mrs. Corey justly.
"Of course she can read and write," admitted Nanny.
"I can't imagine what he finds to talk about with her," said Lily.
"Oh, THAT'S very simple," returned her sister.
"They talk about themselves, with occasional references to each other.
I have heard people 'going on' on the hotel piazzas. She's
embroidering, or knitting, or tatting, or something of that kind; and
he says she seems quite devoted to needlework, and she says, yes, she
has a perfect passion for it, and everybody laughs at her for it; but
she can't help it, she always was so from a child, and supposes she
always shall be,--with remote and minute particulars. And she ends by
saying that perhaps he does not like people to tat, or knit, or
embroider, or whatever. And he says, oh, yes, he does; what could make
her think such a thing? but for his part he likes boating rather
better, or if you're in the woods camping. Then she lets him take up
one corner of her work, and perhaps touch her fingers; and that
encourages him to say that he supposes nothing could induce her to drop
her work long enough to go down on the rocks, or out among the
huckleberry bushes; and she puts her head on one side, and says she
doesn't know really. And then they go, and he lies at her feet on the
rocks, or picks huckleberries and drops them in her lap, and they go on
talking about themselves, and comparing notes to see how they differ
from each other. And----"
"That will do, Nanny," said her mother.