“And that's what we DO call it,” put in Julia, with vivacity. “And why should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all. Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself--at least for the present. But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things for you--why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow Alfred to do things for me.”
“That you never did,” interposed the young man, gayly. “I'll say that for you, Jule.”
“And never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “But no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came you sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all.”
“I never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch of animation.
“Oh no--you never said it,” Julia admitted, “but what else can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----”
“But I did want you to go,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
“Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you won't even come and look at the house!”
“But I don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
“Well, then, you needn't!” said Alfred, rising. “Nobody will ask you again.” “Oh yes they will,” urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.
