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Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her mild, unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous city, even like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little earth to grow in, on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten.
Philip did not neglect to go to luncheon at Rewtham house, and a very pleasant luncheon it was; indeed, it would have been difficult for him to have said which he found the pleasantest: Maria's cheerful chatter and flattering preference, or Hilda's sweet and gracious presence.
Titherington looked so angry that I began to feel afraid. I was quite helpless and I did not want him to revenge himself on me by carrying off the champagne or sending for a second nurse. "There's just one idea which occurs to me," I said. "I doubt whether it will be much use, but you might try it if you're regularly stuck. Write to Hilda's mother." "Who the devil's Hilda's mother?"
She says you are due by right in five minutes" the messenger's smile broadened irresponsibly, and she put a fondling touch upon Hilda's apron string "so will you please to make haste?" "What's the case?" asked Hilda, "I hope it isn't another ship's-hold accident." But Alicia, a shade paler than before, put up her hand. "Wait till I'm gone," she said, and went quickly.
"If he thinks that my daughter isn't good enough for his son " "You needn't shout at me like that," calmly; "but he knows as well as you do that Derry Drake's millions could get him any girl." He had a flashing sense of the coarse fiber of Hilda's mental make-up. "My Jean is a well-born and well-bred woman," he said, slowly. "It is a thing that money can't buy."
The character of Hilda has always struck me as an admirable invention one of those things that mark the man of genius. It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it would both give and borrow.
When Hilda's cab turned, perilously swaying, through the gate into the dark garden of the Orgreaves, Hilda saw another cab already at the open house door, and in the lighted porch stood figures distinguishable as Janet and Alicia, all enwrapped for a journey, and Martha holding more wraps.
When the Countess heard of Hilda's determination Hilda didn't pretend to go through the domestic farce of asking her mother's consent to her approaching marriage she said that so far as she was concerned a more shocking or un-Christian piece of conduct on the part of a well-brought-up girl had never yet been brought to her knowledge.
"I told her the other day when she came to fix the books." "Then that accounts for it." "For what?" "Dad's attitude. I thought it was queer he should fly up all in a moment. She wanted to make trouble, Doctor, and she has made it." Long after Derry had gone to bed, the Doctor sat there pondering on Hilda's treachery. He was in some ways a simple man swayed by the impulse of the moment.
And she found delight in reading her poor mother like an open book, as she supposed. And all the while her mother was dreaming upon the first year of Hilda's life, before she had discovered that her husband's health was as unstable as his character, and comparing the reality of the present with her early illusions. But the clever girl was not clever enough to read just that page.
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