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Updated: June 16, 2025
Altogether, an aspect of rich and glowing youth: no perfect beauty; but something arresting, ardent charged, perhaps over-charged, with personality. Mrs. Colwood said to herself that life at Beechcote would be no stagnant pool. While they lingered in the drawing-room before church, she kept Diana talking.
"Of course I did every word of it! Do you know what those Radical fellows are up to now? They'll never rest until we've lost the Khaibar and then the Lord only knows what'll happen." Diana flew into discussion quick breath, red cheeks! Mrs. Colwood looked on amazed. Presently both appealed to her, the Anglo-Indian. But she smiled and stammered declining the challenge.
Colwood was secretly sure that this very modest and ordinarily stupid young man had never talked so well before, that his mother would have been astonished could she have beheld him. What had come to the young women of this generation! Their grandmothers cared for politics only so far as they advanced the fortunes of their lords otherwise what was Hecuba to them, or they to Hecuba?
She turned and looked about her, at the room, the flowers, the wide hearth, with its blazing logs, at Mrs. Colwood, and finally at Diana. "We are so fond of it already!" said Diana. "Come and get warm." She settled her guest in a chair by the fire, and took a stool beside her. "Did you like Devonshire?" The girl made a little face. "It was awfully quiet.
They must have been very poor. Fanny" she took up the letter "Fanny says she has come home to learn music and French that she may earn money by teaching when she goes back. She doesn't write very well, does she?" She held out the sheet. The handwriting, indeed, was remarkably illiterate, and Mrs. Colwood could only say that probably a girl of Miss Merton's circumstances had had few advantages.
It had produced a kind of indistinguishable echo in the brain, to which she could put no words which was none the less dreary; like a voice of wailing from a far-off past. During the days immediately following her arrival at Beechcote, Mrs. Colwood applied herself to a study of Miss Mallory and her surroundings none the less penetrating because the student was modest and her method unperceived.
She had expected an orphan girl, ignorant of the world, whom she might mother, and perhaps mould. She found a young Egeria, talking politics with raised color and a throbbing voice, as other girls might talk of lovers or chiffons. Egeria's companion secretly and with some alarm reviewed her own equipment in these directions. Miss Mallory discoursed of India. Mrs. Colwood had lived in it.
"You are not coming?" said Hugh Roughsedge to Diana. At this question he saw a delicate flush, beyond her control, creep over her cheek and throat. "I I am expecting Mr. Marsham," she said. "Perhaps I ought to stay." Sir James Chide looked at his watch. "He should be here any minute. We will overtake you, Captain Roughsedge." Hugh went off beside Mrs. Colwood. Well, well, it was all plain enough!
Colwood reflected, are not generally made for happiness. But there were also in Diana signs both of practical ability and of a rare common-sense. Would this last avail to protect her from her enthusiasms? Mrs. Colwood remembered a famous Frenchwoman of whom it was said: "Her judgment is infallible her conduct one long mistake!"
They had taken coffee in the morning-room up-stairs, Diana's own sitting-room, where she wrote her letters and followed out the lines of reading her father had laid down for her. Mrs. Colwood returned thither; found Miss Merton, as it seemed to her, in the act of examining the letters in Diana's blotting-book; and hastily proposed to her to take a turn in the garden.
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