‘I believe you are in love with him, after all,’ said the mother with profound scorn. Millicent did not make any direct answer; but she turned away indignantly, with a frown on her face. In love with him!--no, not so foolish as that; but still it was hard when you come to think of it,--never to be any nearer the end,--just to have to begin again. And when everything seemed so clear and easy! A hundred pounds was very nice, but it was not equal to Renton Manor and a house in Berkeley Square, and everything that heart could desire. Poor Millicent sighed,--she could not help it. And he was so fond of her too, poor fellow! It seemed breaking faith with him to take his money and go off to Germany to marry somebody else on the strength of it. And it was nice to have him always there,--ready, on the shortest notice, to come and worship. ‘All because I am rather pretty,’ Millicent said to herself, with that half scorn with which a woman recognises that it is the least part of her that is loved. Her beauty was everything she had in the world, and yet it was a little strange that that was all Ben Renton could see in her. Her transparent scheming,--her hungry poverty,--her readiness to marry him or any man who had money enough, and asked her,--that all this should be glozed over and hidden by a pair of pretty eyes! This is a weakness of which a great many women take advantage, but which always fills them with a certain contempt. Millicent, who might have had something better in her, and who could have been fond of Ben had he not have been disinherited, saw his folly with a half-disdain. No woman would have been such a fool as that! And yet she could not bear to hear her mother call him a fool.
She got up immediately, however, to begin her packing; and then she took into very serious consideration the question whether a new dress was not absolutely necessary for the new campaign,--a thin dress which she could wear over her old black silk, and which would looked ‘dressed’ at a table-d’hôte or other public place. ‘Don’t you think grenadine would be best?’ she asked her mother, anxiously,--‘or perhaps my white with black ribbons?’ Whatever might be her feelings towards Ben Renton, it was evident there was no time to be lost.