“You are beginning to practise self-denial, Bob,—driving your boon companions away,” said Rashleigh, smiling.
“As a gentleman I could not do otherwise, of course. Since Miss must needs come, they must go. I must learn to seek my amusements, such as they are, out of the house. But I sha’n’t think of that, or of anything to come, while you and these ladies are with me. You see I have set my heart on having you.”
They continued in this strain, walking to and fro between the street end of the passage and the rear of the inn yard, in which different vehicles were standing idle, until Caleb appeared with the announcement that dinner for the whole party was ready. Ascending, they found the ladies on terms of cool politeness as between Georgiana and the other two. During the course of the meal, it could be seen that Mrs. Winter had incurred the greater part of that disfavour which the girl evidently disdained to conceal. Good cause for this could be found, not only in the steeliness of nature suggested by the London lady’s voice and look, but by the great freedom of topic and remark she allowed herself. Time and again was a hot blush called to Georgiana’s cheek, and she was fain to fix her eyes upon her plate in indignation at the disregard of her modesty. That was an age when many young ladies were accustomed to liberties of speech from their elders in their presence—liberties nowadays incredible. How they contrived to ignore them while they were necessarily conscious of them, as it is certain they did, calls for admiration. Nothing that we know of that most delightful of young women, Sophia Western, makes us esteem and love her more than the way in which she endured the coarse talk of her father, never receiving from it the slightest taint herself, never seeming to notice the outrageous portions of it. But it was from men only, or chiefly, that tender ears were used to hearing conversation so free. Had she been subjected to it by one of her own sex, even Sophia Western would have made the protest of a blush. Not that Mrs. Winter’s anecdotes and observations were of the crude plainness of Squire Western’s language. The lady’s tongue was a rapier, not a bludgeon, and there would have been little if anything to reprove in the use she made of it on the present occasion, had Georgiana been absent or ten years older. As it was, besides the offence to her modesty itself, Georgiana felt that she was being treated with intentional lack of consideration. She thought the lady guilty of spite as well as license: she noted, too, and placed to her account against him, the lack of any protest on her uncle’s part on behalf of her innocence. He laughed and was merry, in his easy, fine-gentlemanly way; and the young lady, in her sense of careless outrage, could scarce restrain the tears of injury, loneliness, and revolt.