And he needn’t imagine that he is ever going to have _me_ “quelled” again. I intend taking it out of _him_ all the time I am here! CHAPTER XIV THE FIRST QUARREL So far I have had things all my own way. During the three days that I have now been staying at The Lawn, I have managed to “keep up” without difficulty two utterly distinct and different _manners_. “Manner A.”—assumed for the benefit of the Governor’s family—the rather shy but charming and devoted young _fiancée_. “Manner B.”—well, to be frank, a perfect little _cat_! But to begin with the first manner. I should be ashamed to act it as well as I do, if it weren’t that I must keep the whip-hand over the Governor, and that this is the only way, for his mother and sisters are really too sweet with me. Never, during all the palmy days of the Trant family, have I had so many pretty and generous things said about me as I’ve heard in these three days from my employer’s unsuspecting mother. She told me yesterday, “When Billy was ten I’d begun to wonder whether, somewhere, some other mother was watching a pink-lined cot that held something which was to become very precious, later on, to my little son. And—twenty-one, are you, dear?—it must have been so, then. How glad I am it was you! Ten years is such a nice difference in age, too; I was twenty-one——” And her soft grey eyes looked at me as if they saw, through me, into the past. Her young daughter Blanche, on the other hand, gazes at me as wistfully as though, through me, she could look into the future. I feel as if I were supposed to be standing beside a wall which only I am tall enough (for once!) to see over. “_Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?_” That, of course, isn’t what she says. “Nancy, I suppose you knew almost at once what you felt about Billy?” “Oh, yes!” (Readily.) “You knew he was absolutely the one and only? How lovely!” A pause. “I suppose the way to find out is to imagine him among seventeen other young men, all frightfully good-looking and nice and good sorts, and the right kind of voice, and all wanting to marry you at once, and all that? Then, if you still feel you could choose _him_ out of all those——” “But, Blanche, I should have _had_ to,” I explained, truthfully enough, as I thought of the five hundred pounds. “Couldn’t help myself!” “I see,” sighed Blanche. “_Mustn’t_ it be glorious for you both?” And thirteen-year-old Theo, pouring upon her “new sister” the wealth of superfluous adoration which will some day be wasted, I suppose, upon some quite ordinary young man, proclaims at frequent intervals, “Isn’t it _ripping_ having her here?” and lives entirely in the present. Theo, by the way, is the only one of them before whom I feel I have to be careful not to over-do Manner A.