Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/43

Rh mountains there! Miss Jane softly breathed, while her sister looked at her as if her familiarity with the poetry of the subject made her the most interesting feature of the scene she evoked.

But Miss Becky presently turned to me. 'Do you know everything?'

'Everything?'

'In Europe.'

'Oh, yes,' I laughed, 'and one or two things even in America.'

The sisters seemed to me furtively to look at each other. 'Well, you'll have to be quick—to meet us,' Miss Jane resumed.

'But surely when you're once there you'll stay on.'

'Stay on?'—they murmured it simultaneously and with the oddest vibration of dread as well as of desire. It was as if they had been in the presence of a danger and yet wished me, who 'knew everything,' to torment them with still more of it.

Well, I did my best. 'I mean it will never do to cut it short.'

'No, that's just what I keep saying,' said brilliant Jane. 'It would be better, in that case, not to go.'

'Oh, don't talk about not going—at this time!' It was none of my business, but I felt shocked and impatient.

'No, not at this time!' broke in Miss Maria, who, very red in the face, had joined us. Poor Miss Maria was known as the flushed one; but she was not flushed—she only had an unfortunate surface. The third day after this was to see them embark.

Miss Becky, however, desired as little as any one to be in any way extravagant. 'It's only the thought of our mother,' she explained.

I looked a moment at the old lady, with whom my sister-in-law was engaged. 'Well—your mother's magnificent.'

'Isn't she magnificent?'—they eagerly took it up.