Spring Days | Page 7

see her again."
Willy made no answer. He was debating; he was still uncertain whether the present time could be considered a favourable one to introduce his scheme to his father's notice, and he had made up his mind that it was, when he was interrupted by Mr. Brookes, who had again lapsed into one of his semi-soliloquies.
"Your sisters give me a great deal of trouble, a very great deal of anxiety. I am all alone. I have no one to help me since the death of your poor mother."
"My sisters are fitted for nothing but pleasure," Willy replied severely.

II

Mr. Brookes went to London every day by the five minutes to ten; Willy walked into Brighton. There he had been for some time striving to found an agency for artificial manures, and in the twilight of a small office he brooded over the different means of making money that were open to him. The young ladies worked or played as it struck their fancy. Sally admitted that she infinitely preferred walking round the garden with a young man to doing wool-work in the drawing-room. Maggie shared this taste, although she did not make bold profession of it. Grace was the gentlest of the sisters, and had passed unnoticed until she had fallen in love with a penniless officer, and tortured her father with tears and haggard cheeks because he refused to supply her with money to keep a husband. The doctor had ordered her iron; she had been sent to London for a change, but neither remedy was of much avail, and when she returned home pale and melancholy she had not taken the keys from Maggie, but had allowed her to usurp her place inthe house. Sally was supposed to look after the conservatories, but beyond her own special flowers she left everything to the gardeners.
On Sundays Mr. Brookes walked through the long drawing-rooms aimlessly. Sometimes he would stop before one of his pictures. "There, that's a good picture, I paid a lot of money for it, I paid too much, mustn't do so again." Passing his daughters, sometimes without speaking, he then stopped before one of the big chimney-pieces, and, pulling out his large silk pocket handkerchief, dusted the massive clocks and candlesticks.
In the billiard-room, at a table drawn up close to the coke fire, Willy slowly and with much care made pencil notes, which he slowly and with great solemnity copied into his diary.
"Your sisters are a great source of trouble to me, a source of deep anxiety," said Mr. Brookes, and he flicked the rearing legs of a bronze horse with his handkerchief.
"My sisters are only fit for pleasure," said Willy and he finished the tail of the y, passed the blotting paper over, and prepared to begin a fresh paragraph.
"I am afraid Grace is scarcely any better; she will not leave her room. I hear she is crying. It is too ridiculous, too ridiculous. What she can see in that man I can't think; he is only a man of pleasure. I've told her so, but somehow she can't get to see why I will not settle money upon her--money that I made myself, by hard work, judicious investments."
"That's a smack at the shop," thought Willy, as he placed his full stop.
"I'll not settle my money upon her," said Mr. Brookes, as he resumed his dusting; "and for what? to keep an idle fellow in idleness. No, I'll not do it. She'll get over it--ah, it will be all the same a hundred years hence. But tell me, have you noticed--no, you notice nothing--"
"Yes, I do; what do you want me to say, that she is looking very ill? I can't help it if she is. I've quite enough troubles of my own without thinking of other people's. I'm sure I am very sorry. I wish she'd never met the fellow."
"That's what I say, I wish she'd never met the fellow, and she never would had it not been for that horrible Southdown Road. Southwick has never been the same since those villas were put up."
"I know nothing about them; I won't know them. I don't go to the Horlocks because I may meet people there I don't want to know. If you hadn't allowed the girls to go there, she never would have met him."
"But we had to call on the Horlocks. Every Viceroy that ever came to India called upon her, and they're excellent people--titled people come down from London to see them: but I daresay their banking accounts wouldn't bear looking into. She walks about the green with the chemist's wife, and has the people of the baths to dinner. Mostextraordinary woman. I like her, I enjoy her society; but I can't follow her in her opinions. She says that only men are