“I have brought Mr. Cornish,” explained Roden. “We are frozen, and want some tea.”
Dorothy Roden came forward and shook hands with Cornish. She looked up at him, taking him all in, in one quick intuitive glance, from his smooth head to his neat boots.
“It is horribly cold,” she said. One cannot always be original and sparkling, and it is wiser not to try too persistently. She turned and re-entered the drawing-room, with Cornish following her. The room itself was prettily furnished in the Dutch fashion, and there were flowers. Dorothy Roden's manner was that of a woman; no longer in her first girlhood, who had seen en and cities. She was better educated than her brother; she was probably cleverer. She had, at all events, the subtle air of self-restraint that marks those women whose lives are passed in the society of a man mentally inferior to themselves. Of course all women are in a sense doomed to this--according to their own thinking.
“Percy said that he would probably bring you in to tea,” said Miss Roden, “and that probably you would be tired out.”
“Thanks; I am not tired. We had a good passage, and everything has run as smoothly. Do you take an active interest in us?”
Miss Roden paused in the action of pouring out tea, and looked across at her interlocutor.
“Not an active one,” she answered, with a momentary gravity; and, after a minute, glanced at Cornish's face again.
“It is going to be a big thing,” he said enthusiastically. “My cousin Joan Ferriby is working hard at it in London. You do not know her, I suppose?”
“I was at school with Joan,” replied Miss Roden, with her soft laugh.
“And we took a school-girl oath to write to each other every week when we parted. We kept it up--for a fortnight.”
Cornish's smooth face betrayed no surprise; although he had concluded that Miss Roden was years older than Joan.
“Perhaps,” he said, with ready tact, “you do not take an interest in the same things as Joan. In what may be called new things--not clothes, I mean. In factory girls' feather clubs, for instance, or haberdashers' assistants, or women's rights, or anything like that.”
“No; I am not clever enough for anything like that. I am profoundly ignorant about women's rights, and do not even know what I want, or ought to want.”