'What a thousand pities, my dear Miss Ellis, to throw away your charming talents, through that terrible diffidence! However, I can't give you up so easily. I must positively bring you round;--only if we stop now, we shan't have a moment for those horrid hard passages. So where's my music? And where have you conjured your harp?'
The music, she answered, she had neither seen nor heard of; the harp, useless since no longer necessary, she had sent home.
The smiles and sprightly airs of Miss Arbe now instantly vanished, and were succeeded by undisguised displeasure. To send back, without consulting her, an instrument that could never have been obtained but through her recommendation, she called an action the most extraordinary: she was too much hurried, however, to enter into any discussion; and must drive home immediately, to enquire what that eternal blunderer, her cousin Giles, had done, not only with her note, but with her music; which was of so much consequence, that his whole life could not make her amends, if it had met with any accident.
Ellis had been so far from purporting to cast herself into any dependence upon Miss Arbe, that, upon this unjust resentment, she suffered her to run down stairs, without offering any apology. Conceiving, however, that the parcel, left by Mr Giles, might possibly contain the music in question, she followed her with it into the shop; where she had the mortification of hearing her say, 'Miss Matson, as to your debts, you must judge for yourself. I can't pretend to be responsible for the credit of every body that solicits my patronage.'
With the silent displeasure of contempt, Ellis put the parcel into her hands, and retreated.
'Why how's this? here is my note unopened,' cried Miss Arbe.
Ellis, returning, said that she had not seen any note.
Miss Arbe declared that she had placed it, herself, within the pack-thread that was tied round the music; but it appeared that Mr Giles had squeezed it under the brown paper cover, whence it had not been visible.
'And I wrote it,' cried Miss Arbe, 'purposely that you might be ready with your answer; and to beg that you would not fail to study the passages I marked with a pencil, that we might know how to finger them when we met. However, I shall certainly never trust that monstrous tiresome creature with another commission.'