Part 5 (1/2)
”Well, Algitha,” said her father, wondering at her silence, ”how are the roses getting on? And I hope you have not forgotten the sweet-brier that you promised to grow for me.”
”Oh, no, father, the sweet-brier has been ordered,” returned Algitha, without her usual brightness of manner.
”Have you a headache?” enquired Mrs. Fullerton. ”I hope you have not all been sitting up talking in Hadria's room, as you are too fond of doing.
You have the whole day in which to express your ideas, and I think you might let the remainder wait over till morning.”
”We _were_ rather late last night,” Algitha confessed.
”Pressure of ideas overpowering,” added Fred.
”When _I_ was young, ideas would never have been tolerated in young people for a moment,” said Mrs. Fullerton, ”it would have been considered a mark of ill-breeding. You may think yourselves lucky to be born at this end of the century, instead of the other.”
”Indeed we do!” exclaimed Ernest. ”It's getting jolly interesting!”
”In some respects, no doubt we have advanced,” observed his mother, ”but I confess I don't understand all your modern notions. Everybody seems to be getting discontented. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to be millionaires; men want to do their master's work, and women want to do men's; everything is topsy-turvy!”
”The question is: What const.i.tutes being right side up?” said Ernest.
”One can't exactly say what is topsy-turvy till one knows _that_.”
”When I was young we thought we _did_ know,” said Mrs. Fullerton, ”but no doubt we are old-fas.h.i.+oned.”
When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circ.u.mstance! What had Emerson been dreaming of?
Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his b.u.t.ton-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.
Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.
Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she was in the right.
”It can't be fair even for parents to order one's whole life according to their pleasure,” she said. ”Other girls submit, I know----”
”And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be _m.u.f.fled_----or morbid.”
”That's what _I_ should become if I pottered about here much longer,”
said Algitha--”morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is morbidness.”
Both sisters were instinctively trying to b.u.t.tress up Algitha's courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments.
”Is it fair,” Hadria asked, ”to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?”
”In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice.”
”Oh, seeing the bearings of things is _always_ poor comfort!” exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. ”Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with the crowd.”
”Nonsense!” cried Algitha, who had no sympathy with these pa.s.sionate discouragements that alternated, in Hadria, with equally pa.s.sionate exaltations.
”When you have gone, I will ask Mrs. Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games--besique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crus.h.i.+ng discipline.”