“Oh, no,” said the girls, one after another. “If it is any pleasure to him to live,” Anne added reflectively, after a pause.
“Pleasure to live? It is always a pleasure to live, at least it seems so. No one wishes to die as long as he can help it. I wonder why myself; for when you are feeble and languid and everything is a trouble, it seems strange to wish to go on. They do, though,” said the middle-aged mother with a sigh. She thought of Sir Walter as they thought of her, with a mixture of awe and impatience. They felt that their own eager state, looking forward to life, must be so far beyond anything that was possible to her; just as she felt her own weary yet life-full being to be so far in the range of vitality above him. She drew the stocking off her arm as she spoke, and smoothed it out, and matched it with its fellow, and rolled them both up into that tidy ball which is the proper condition of a pair of stockings when they are clean and mended, and ready to be put on. “I think I will go up to the nursery and take a look at the children,” she said. “Horry had a cold; I should like to see that there is no feverishness about him now he is in bed.”
Ally and Anne dropped their work with one accord as their mother went away, not because her departure freed them, but because their excitement, their doubt, their sense of the family crisis all intensified when restraint was withdrawn, and they felt themselves free to discuss the problem between themselves. “What do you think?” they both said instinctively, the two questions meeting as it were in mid career and striking against each other. “I think,” said Anne, quickly, not pausing a moment, “that there is a great deal in what mother says.”
“Oh, do you?” said Ally, with an answering look of disappointment; then she added, “Of course there must be, or mother would not say it. But would you ever be so happy anywhere as you would be in Penton? Would you think anywhere else as good--London, or even abroad--oh, Anne, Penton!”
And now it was that Anne showed that skeptical, not to say cynical spirit, that superiority to tradition which had never appeared before in any of her family.
“After all,” she said, “what is Penton? Only a house like another. I never heard that it was particularly convenient or even beautiful more than quantities of other houses. It is very large--a great deal too large for us--and without furniture, as mother says. Fancy walking into a great empty, echoing place, without a carpet or a chair, and pretending to be comfortable. It makes me shudder to think of, whatever you may say.”