It was noticeable that when the chaperon now touched upon the subject of the Winstanley family, she did so in a key greatly altered from her former contemptuous one. A man who had risen in a night from commonplace obscurity to his present wealth and growing importance was a type of her country she could not conscientiously overlook. She recalled to Mr. Glynn that she had thought his future father-in-law "so quaint yet forceful." She was not as enthusiastic over Mr. Glynn’s fiancée, but there are limits to what we must expect of women.
Still, her active mind was even then springing ahead of the present. If she succeeded, as now seemed probable, in bringing about the reconciliation between Helen and her father’s wife, and Helen consented to return to them for the present, obviously Miss Bleecker, although with a warm nest-egg in her pocket, would be, vulgarly speaking, out of a job. What better than to annex herself to the Winstanleys, to have the credit of forming a young creature who was destined to conspicuous place before the world and even, perhaps——?
Miss Bleecker, at this juncture, cast a furtive glance at her reflection in the little slip of mirror over Helen’s head. It was not exactly favorable, since she had risen before the world was aired, her complexion looked yellow where it ought to be red, and certain fatal lines around nose and mouth, elusive in the evening, stood out, abnormally plain! Miss Bleecker looked away. By and by, hope springing eternal, whispered to her that what a rich old man wants in a wife is not youth and beauty, provoking the eternal triangle of the modern situation, but agreeability, tact, a knowledge of how to make the wheels go round. She rallied, smiled at Mr. Glynn in the manner of a sweet old-time friend and counsellor, then taking out a French novel and a pearl-handled paper-cutter, subsided into apparent literature and actual plan-making.
Helen wondered if ever girl in her position were more curiously hounded by odd circumstance. She saw that Glynn, like herself, was profoundly moved by their rencontre. And what wonder, since when they had last met she had sobbed her farewell upon his breast, his arms had tightly closed around her, and he had declared that he could not, would not give her up!