Mr. Mountford’s countenance relaxed while this description was made--an almost imperceptible softening crept about the corners of his mouth. He seemed to feel the arms of the little puss creeping round his neck, and her pretty little rosebud face close to his own. But he shook off the fascination abruptly, and frowned to make his wife think him insensible to it. ‘I hope I am not such a weak fool,’ he said. ‘And there is not much chance that Anne would try that way,’ he added, with some bitterness. Rose was supposed to be his favourite child, but yet he resented the fact that no such confession of his absolute authority and homage to his power was to be looked for from Anne. Mrs. Mountford had no deliberate intention of presenting his eldest daughter to him under an unfavourable light, but if she wished him to perceive the superior dutifulness and sweetness of her own child, could anyone wonder? Rose had been hardly used by Nature. She ought to have been a boy and the heir of entail, or, if not so, she ought to have had a brother to take that position, and protect her interests; and neither of these things had happened. That her father should love her best and do all in his will that it was possible to do for her, was clearly Rose’s right as compensation for the other injustices of fate.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Mountford, after a longer piece of mental arithmetic than usual, ‘that is not Anne’s way; but still you must do Anne justice, St. John. She will never believe, any more than Rose, that you will go against her. I don’t say this from anything she has said to me. Indeed, I cannot say that she has spoken to me at all on the subject. It was I that introduced it; I thought it my duty.’
‘And she gave you to understand that she would go on with it, whatever I might say; and that, like an old fool, if she stuck to it, I would give in at the end?’
‘St. John! St. John! how you do run away with an idea! I never said that, nor anything like it. I told you what, judging from what I know of girls, I felt sure Anne must feel. They never dream of any serious opposition: as we have given in to them from their childhood, they think we will continue to give in to them to the end; and I am sure it is quite reasonable to think so; only recollect how often we have yielded, and done whatever they pleased.’
