The Daughters of Mrs Peacock by Gerald Bullet Page A

Though infinitely respectful, endearingly modest, he had been impetuous and brave. He knew what he wanted and was resolved to get it. Behind that mask of diffidence and excessive gravity lived a mature resolute spirit and a mind that refused to be deflected from its purpose by her evasive flippancies. Having thus created a new Mr Pardew, patient, masterful, and of wisdom and irony all compact, she proceeded to endow him with learning and saintlinessfor good measure: no sense in scamping the job. He was, she knew, a university man, with an honours degree, and might one day be a bishop. She grew hot and cold remembering how lightly she had dismissed him.
    The truth is, she said, I’m frivolous, too fond of making fun. At my age I ought to be more serious, like Julia. Why doesn’t he marry
her?
It would be just the thing. As a brother-in-law he would be nearly perfect. Yet, oddly, the idea did not entirely please her. Already she had certain property rights in the lover she did not want. She did not want him, but was not yet quite ready to let him go; and, though she half-dreaded the prospect, she was impatient to see him again.
    No woman since the world began—nor man either—has received with perfect indifference a declaration of love, no matter from what source; and even though disdain or repulsion or fear be her dominant emotion, mingling with it, in greater or less degree, is gratification, the response of a caressed vanity of which she may be unaware. Being young and inexperienced, neither Miss Sarah nor Mr Pardew was possessed of this universal truth of human nature. He did not, could not know, that by exposing his desire for her he had made himself for the moment the most interesting person in the world, nor she that her being desired had unsettled her judgment and half-persuaded her that she was fond of him. The seed he had sown, unregarded at the time, blossomed into a gratitude—mingled with compassion—that was dangerously akin to love, or at least could easily be mistaken for it if shewere not careful. Unknowingly, he had added to her stature, transformed her conception of herself, given her a blissful sense of her own value: never again could she think of herself, without qualification, as the ordinary homely one, outshone by her beautiful sisters, with nothing but a lively sense of the ludicrous to offset her unremarkable appearance. Looking at herself in the glass, she tried to see what Mr Pardew presumably saw in her, and though the endeavour was unsuccessful she was more than ready to defer to his masculine and therefore (in this matter) superior judgment. There was, perceptibly, a new sparkle in her eyes, and with the hair done a little differently perhaps something might be made of her, in spite of the comic nose and dumpy figure. It was, at any rate, worth trying.
    Catherine, who still shared with her the big bedroom that had once been the night nursery for all three, was more conscious than Sarah herself of the outward change in her. She had noticed uneasily that except at mealtimes, when the family was fully mustered and a special effort was called for, this volatile sister of hers was strangely unlike herself: silent and self-absorbed. The comfortable bedtime chatter which they had enjoyed together all their lives, their voices, disembodied by the darkness, growing drowsier and drowsier till sleep at last supervened, had become, as the days went by, more and more abbreviated.
    â€˜Sarah! … Are you awake?’
    â€˜No,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m fast asleep.’
    â€˜Will you promise not to be cross if I ask you something?’
    â€˜Cross? I’m never cross.’
    â€˜You are, you know, sometimes. You have been, lately. Not cross exactly. But sort of.’
    â€˜It’s news to me. Since when, pray?’ Regretting the incautious question Sarah hastened to add: ‘Can a person be cross without knowing it? I shouldn’t have thought so.’