'Let go, let go,' he cries, between struggling and laughing, and then mischievously, 'You don't look half pretty now, you're quite red. I'll--tell Mr Dal--'
'Sha'n't tell you,' he says, making for the door, but Philippa is too quick for him, and placing her back against it, says in tones of mild reproof,
'Do you know, it is very rude to make personal remarks.'
'Is it?' he asks, 'well you see it was only to Mr Dalrymple, and I've known him for such a great many years, I met him yesterday, he was walking the same way as me, and--you've got a hair-pin coming out, Aunt Lippa.'
'Never mind that,' says she, adjusting the straying article, 'and--'
'Oh, him or I began, I don't 'xactly remember, but we talked about pretty persons, and he said he was glad he wasn't a pretty person, because they were nearly always nasty, and then I said they weren't, 'cos there's mother and you, and I said you're always pretty.'
'He said,' replies Teddy, in the gruffest voice he can assume, trying to imitate Jimmy, '"More's the pity," and now you see I can just tell him you don't look pretty a bit, when you're holding somebody in your arms.'
'You must not say anything of the kind,' says she; it would be useless to exact a promise from him, probably be the way to make him repeat the conversation word for word; but Philippa has found out what she wanted to know, namely, that Jimmy is in London, and it causes her for the moment exquisite pain, to feel that he is not so far away, for though the Metropolis is a large place, there is always the chance of meeting one's friends in the street.
After deep thought Philippa has made up her mind to tell no one, of all she has heard and of all that has happened in consequence. She can rely on Ponsonby keeping secret the little he knows of it; but what is hardest to bear is the having nothing to look forward to, for the future looks, oh, so dark and dreary. Sometimes she feels that it cannot be true, and she shrinks with horror from the remembrance of the fate that may be awaiting her. But Mabel does not notice that something has changed her; that her step is not so light as it was, or her laugh so gay. How little we know of each other, although living the same lives, seeing the same people and things; we have all got an inner existence which no one but ourselves knows anything about, it is so shadowy and unreal, that contact with the outer world would crush all the beauty and poetry of it.