“I think they might have asked me,” said Susie in an aggrieved tone. “I am just the same age as Lucy Scrymgeour. It isn’t my fault mother, that you’ve never taken me out yet. I am seventeen and _past_, as everybody knows.”
“No, it’s not your fault. I am sure you have badgered me enough about it,” said Mrs. Dalyell; “but though you think you can do anything you like with me, I have my opinions about some things. And one of them is that a girl should not go out too soon. People are quite capable of saying, ten or twenty years hence, ‘Oh, Susie Dalyell, I can tell you her age to a day! She came out in such a year, and she must have been nineteen at the least.’ That is exactly how people talk.”
“And if they did,” cries Susie, “what would it matter? Farmer thinks I look quite eighteen when I have my hair nicely dressed.”
“That is all very well now, my dear; but wait till you are thirty or thirty-five. You would like to put on a year or two now, but you will like to take them off at the other end.”
“Let’s hope,” said Mr. Wedderburn from behind his paper, “that she’ll not be Susie Dalyell then.”
“What difference will that make?” said Susie scornfully. “If I were forty I should never make a mystery about it. What is the use of trying to hide it, if you do have one foot in the grave?”
“Mother’s forty--or more,” said Alice, “and nobody would say she had one foot in the grave.”
“Oh, what does it matter,” cried Susie again, “at that time of life, when you are medeval and antediluvious? It is now that one minds.”
“Susie, don’t call mamma such dreadful names.”
“Mediæval and antediluvian, Susie”--from behind the paper, in an undertone.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Dalyell tartly, “that Mr. Wedderburn thinks that quite appropriate. Gentlemen always think a girl’s impertinence is amusing when it’s directed against her mother; but you ought to know better, Susie, than to hold me up to ridicule. I am sure, whatever else I may be, I have been a careful mother to you.”
“Oh, mamma! As if I meant anything like that,” cried Susie petulantly, flinging herself upon her mother. “I only mean you don’t care now. It’s nothing to you to think of Lucy dancing all night in billows of tulle, like the girls in the novels, and me going to bed at ten o’clock. They will only just have begun then. And to think they should have asked Fred! and me Lucy’s greatest friend and contemporaneous, and friends with Davie all my life--and that they never thought of asking me--never even tried! Perhaps if they had asked me--and it’s such an opportunity and such old friends--you would have let me go.”
