"I expect Monica will be like ice, and Margaret will seem so much easier to talk to, and if I dared to suggest that Monica should unbend a little, she would freeze me as well. Oh, it's all very difficult," sighed Pauline to herself, "and perhaps I'd better not try to influence things. Only if he does seem to like Margaret much better than Monica, I shall have to bring poor Richard into the conversation, which always makes Margaret cross for days."
As she came to this resolution, Pauline looked half apprehensively at her sister reading in the tumbledown armchair by the fire. How angry Margaret would be if she guessed what was being plotted, and Pauline actually jumped when she suddenly declared that Mansfield Park was almost the best book Jane Austen ever wrote.
"Is it, darling Margaret?" said Pauline with a disarming willingness to be told again that it certainly was.
"Or perhaps Emma," Margaret murmured, and Pauline hid herself behind the curtains. How droll Father had been about the 'new young creature' at Plashers Mead. It had been so difficult to persuade him to interrupt one precious afternoon of planting bulbs to do his duty either as a neighbour or as Rector of the parish. And when he came back all he would say of the visit was:
"Very pleasant, my dears, oh, yes, he showed me everything, and he really has a most remarkable collection of dish-covers, quite remarkable. But I ought not to have deserted those irises that Garstin sent me from the Taurus. Now perhaps we shall manage that obstinate little plum-coloured brute which likes the outskirts of a pine-forest, so they tell me."
Just as Pauline was laughing to herself at the memory of her father's visit, the Rector himself appeared on the lawn. He was in his shirt-sleeves: his knees were muddy with kneeling: and Birdwood the gardener, all blown about by the wind, was close behind him, carrying an armful of roots.
Pauline threw up the window with a crash and called out:
"Father, Father, what a darling you look, and your hair will be swept right away, if you aren't careful."
The Rector waved his trowel remotely, and Pauline blew him kisses, until she was made aware of protests in the room behind her.
"Really," exclaimed Monica. "You are so noisy. You're almost vulgar."