‘You don’t get a step farther on,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘you are just where you were, shilly-shallying,--no better than your brother. My poor Fitzgerald! if he had been spared, he might have been a help to me. Providence is very strange! He lived long enough to be a burden and take every penny we had; and then, when he might have made me some return---- And it is just the same thing, over again, with you.’
‘Don’t speak of Fitzgerald, mamma,’ said Millicent. ‘I was fond of him, although you may not think it. You worried him till he could not bear it any longer; but you cannot get rid of me like that. I will never shoot myself. I mean to live in spite of everything,--and I mean to take my own time.’
‘You are an unnatural girl!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with excitement. ‘Did not I do everything for that boy? Tutors and books, and I don’t know what; and then to break down. A young man has no business to fail when his people have done so much for him. And now there is you,--I have spared no expense about you, either. You have had the best masters I could give you, and the prettiest dresses; and now you stand doing nothing. I should like to know what this young Renton means.’
‘It would be very easy to ask him,--and drive him away for ever,’ said Millicent, with a heightened colour. ‘Mamma, I tell you, you are not so clever as you were.’
‘I believe you are in love with him,’ said the mother, with an accent of scorn;--‘nothing else could account for it. That is all that is wanting to make up the story. But I tell you this will not do,’ she added, with an instant change of tone. ‘We shall have to run away if some determination is not come to. I have no money to carry on with, and there is a month’s rent owing to this horrid woman; and the tradespeople and all---- Millicent, there must be something done. If you are going to marry young Renton, it will be all very well; but if it is to come to nothing, as so many other things have done----’
‘What would you have me do?’ said Millicent, in a low tone of restrained passion. Perhaps she was angry with herself for playing so poor a _rôle_; but, at all events, she was disgusted with the mother who had trained her to do it, and thus kept her to the humiliating work. Mrs. Tracy was getting, as her daughter said, rather old. Her ear was not fine enough for the inflections of tone and shades of meaning which once she could have caught in a moment.