How could her father, who was after
all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her,
who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife
a perfect gentleman? What would he have been, pray? Much she knew
about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to
like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come--
the chance to plead with her and beg her off. But she presented such
an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message
to a varnished door. She wasn't a woman, said Adela; she was an
address.
When she dined in Seymour Street the "children," as the girl called
the others, including Godfrey, liked her. Beatrice and Muriel stared
shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally
over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the
air. They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they
didn't know, any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.
When she was upstairs with them after dinner Adela could see her look
round the room at the things she meant to alter--their mother's
things, not a bit like her own and not good enough for her. After a
quarter of an hour of this our young lady felt sure she was deciding
that Seymour Street wouldn't do at all, the dear old home that had
done for their mother those twenty years. Was she plotting to
transport them all to her horrible Prince's Gate? Of one thing at
any rate Adela was certain: her father, at that moment alone in the
dining-room with Godfrey, pretending to drink another glass of wine
to make time, was coming to the point, was telling the news.
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