Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning to find her standing before her window looking out at the Thames, the Embankment, the hansom cabs themselves, with an absolutely serious absorption. This changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.
“I am delighted,” she said. “I could scarcely tell you how much. The impression is all new and I am excited a little by everything. I am so intensely glad that I have saved it so long and that I have known it only as part of literature. I am even charmed that it rains, and that the cabmen's mackintoshes are shining and wet.” She drew forward a chair, and Mrs. Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary admiration.
“You look as if you were delighted,” she said. “Your eyes--you have amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she married?”
Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely. She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as other qualities she possessed were powerful.
“I was eight years old,” she said. “I was a rude little girl, with long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember answering back.”
“I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and that you were opposed to the marriage.”
“Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight 'opposing' the marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite capable of it. You see in those days we had not been trained at all (one had only been allowed tremendous liberty), and interfered conversationally with one's elders and betters at any moment. I was an American little girl, and American little girls were really--they really were!” with a laugh, whose musical sound was after all wholly non-committal.
“You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters.”
“He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing should have taught me to hold my little tongue. I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments. Perhaps he has a horror of me.”
“I should like to be present at your first meeting,” Mrs. Worthington reflected. “You are going down to Stornham to-morrow?”