“My dear, what they all want--to enjoy himself,” Philip Selby replied.
“Enjoy himself--do you call that enjoyment? He looks as if he had swallowed a poker; and is never trusted for a moment out of the charge of two or three Pilgrims. I don’t think I’ll ask these people again.”
“They are very good sort of people, Joan; and considering the position in which they stood to your uncle Henry----”
“I’m very tired of Uncle Henry, Phil; besides, the girls didn’t stand in any position--and I never authorised them to bring a strange young man.”
“He’s after none of them. Can’t you see that with half an eye? It’s my belief he’s spying out for our Liddy. And what will mother say to me if I let her make acquaintance with a stranger? I said, ‘You needn’t fear, mother; she’ll meet nobody you don’t want her to meet at my house.’”
“Well, well,” said Philip Selby, soothingly; “there’s half the room between them; and nobody can say, my dear, that it’s your fault.”
“But that’s just what mother will do,” said Joan, with a puckered brow, as if her mother had been the most alarming critic in existence. She laughed at herself afterwards, and went to the table to superintend the round game, in which Liddy was deeply involved, seated by young Selby’s side. There was a strong sense of responsibility on Joan’s mind, or rather, she was a little cross. Her cakes had not come quite so well out of the oven as she intended, and Mrs. Doctor Selby had suggested a fault in the flavour of the tea. She went up to the players in a stormy state of mind. “Come, come,” she said, “you’re not sitting right. Liddy, you come over here and help little Ellen; all you strong ones are together. Raaf,” this was to young Selby, “stay where you are. I’ll put Miss Armstrong, she’s not playing at all, next to you.”
At this young Selby made a grimace, but Liddy tripped out of her place with all the alacrity possible, leaving her seat and devoting herself to little Ellen. She even gave her sister a smiling look of gratitude. “Thank you,” she said, in an under-tone, “but it was rude, Joan.”
“Now you are a deal better arranged, and the game will go faster; there will be no cheating,” Joan said. She did not care a bit for being called rude. Raaf Selby should know that he was not good enough for a Joscelyn whatever his cousin might be. “One’s enough,” she said to herself. Besides, she wanted for Liddy something that should be out of the common altogether. She herself had done very well in marriage. She had got an excellent man, with enough to be comfortable upon. But she did not feel that she would be satisfied with only so much for her little sister. Not that Raaf Selby at his best could hold a candle to Phil. He was not much except when he was on a horse; then she was obliged to allow he looked pretty well. But a man can’t always be on a horse’s back, and anywhere else he was not worth looking twice at; very different from Phil. Even Phil, however, much as she respected her husband, was not the kind of person she wanted for Liddy. A fairy prince, if any such fantastic being had ever existed in Joan’s steady imagination, was the sort of person who ought to be Lydia’s fate; a fine young fellow (young to start with), and handsome, and well off, and with an air above the rest of the world. Unawares, as her eyes went round her guests, they fell once more upon the tall young stranger behind Mrs. Pilgrim’s chair. Was that the kind of man? Well, if he had not been an intruder, a stranger, a hanger-on of the Pilgrims’ (though certainly not in love with either of the girls), that was the kind of person. She drew near Mrs. Pilgrim as this unsolicited thought arose in her mind. She was annoyed with herself to think that a person whom she did not know, and who had no right to be here, should thus have taken her eye.