“Dear me!” Hannah said. They were the first words she had spoken and she wished Wilfrid could have heard them. It was the only possible comment and she thought he would have appreciated it in her own sense.
Ethel interpreted it as astonishment, and she hastened to explain that Wilfrid was a dreadful tease but he did not mean to be unkind. He did not realize how much she was in earnest about temperance reform. Or perhaps he did—what did Miss Mole think?—but liked to pretend he could take nothing seriously. She wished he was not a medical student. They were rather a wild lot, yet the doctor’s was a noble profession and that of a medical missionary was the best of all. She had wanted to be a missionary herself—in China—but, when her mother died, it seemed to be her duty to stay at home.
“And now I’ve come, and if I turn out all right, perhaps you’ll be able to go after all.”
Ethel gave what was equivalent to a violent shy, keeping her eyes, meanwhile, on the object which had alarmed her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I do such a lot for Father. And I have a Girls’ Club at the Mission. I’d given up all idea of going away.”
“The missionary field, as they call it, or the stage,” Hannah said. “It’s generally one or the other, in one’s teens, not that I ever fancied myself at either. But all the world’s a stage, as you’ll find in Familiar Quotations.”
“And, in a way, a missionary field, too,” Ethel said eagerly. “And perhaps it’s really harder to stay at home.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Hannah said. “Oughtn’t I to be darning, or something?”
“Oh, not on your first evening, Miss Mole! The basket’s in that cupboard and I’m afraid you’ll find a lot of socks in it.”
“All the more reason for starting, then. And you said Mr. Corder likes his tea at ten o’clock?”
“And biscuits.”
“And biscuits,” Hannah repeated. “Keeps him awake, I should think,” she said, rummaging in the mending basket. “Yes, there’s plenty to do here.”
Ethel shied again. “I’m always so busy,” she said, fidgeting with her beads, while Hannah thrust a thin, probing hand into socks and stockings. “I’m so glad you’ve come, Miss Mole, and I knew I should like anyone recommended by Mrs. Spenser-Smith.”
“Did she choose the servant for you, too?” Hannah asked casually.
“Oh no! She’s one of my girls. One of my club girls. So she always has to go out on Wednesdays, Miss Mole. That’s the Club social evening. And it’s the weeknight service at the chapel, so Father and Doris and I are all out and we have to have a high tea that evening.”
“Sardines, I suppose?”
“Not always,” Ethel said simply, and Hannah, who had been ready to suggest that these piles of mending should be shared and Ethel’s restless hands employed, felt herself softening towards this young woman who wanted to approach and would be scared by a sudden movement. She went on with her darning, behaving as she would have behaved with the nervous colt, pretending she was not watching it and letting it get used to her presence before she advanced, and she could feel Ethel gaining confidence though her fears kept jerking her back.
Aloud, she said cunningly, “I’m afraid I’ve frightened everybody else away. Do you think your sister ought to be sitting up there, in the cold?”
Ethel showed the whites of her eyes but, this time, she did not jump. “I think we’d better leave her alone, Miss Mole. Nobody knows how to manage her. Mother did.” And now it was Ethel’s turn to look ready to cry. “And she gets on with my brother—everyone does—but she doesn’t seem to want me to be kind to her.”
“She doesn’t look very strong.”
“Perhaps that’s it,” Ethel said hopefully, and it occurred to Hannah that here was another someone else who was not happy unless everybody appreciated her, and this one had less than common skill to evoke the admiration she wanted. Hannah was inclined to think that this was a feminine craving, the result of work in which the personal element was supreme, but she was to learn that in this household there was no one who was free from it. Robert Corder, it was true, made no efforts: he had found they were unnecessary and he accepted, as his due, the particular kind of adulation given to a man in his position and was astonished only if it was denied him, and when Hannah had seen him in his chapel, after a service, petting, and being petted by, a docile flock, it was easy to understand why he treated her with marked coldness. She had tripped him up on her first evening in his house, and while his vanity and her appearance could persuade him that this was an accident, he was careful not to get in her way again. It was also easy to understand why Lilla had introduced the watchdog. Miss Patsy Withers, a plump, fading, but still comely blonde, would have made a soothing companion for the Reverend Robert, a woman who would always say what she meant and, still more commendably, mean the thing most likely to please him, and when Hannah dusted the large photograph of the late Mrs. Corder which stood on the minister’s desk, she wondered if that lady had ever puzzled her husband. She looked capable of a silence which was certainly not due to any lack of ideas, and the more Hannah examined that face, the more she liked it, and the more she was convinced that Lilla’s loyalty to the dead was a romantic way of expressing her determination to keep her own place as leading lady in the chapel.
It amused Hannah to see Lilla walking down the aisle to her prominent pew, to meet her in the porch and receive an appropriate bow and sometimes even a handshake, and Hannah always took care
