Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

28. CHAPTER XXVIII: MRS BOLD IS ENTERTAINED BY DR AND MRS GRANTLY AT PLUMSTEAD (continued)

As soon as they were in the drawing-room Mrs Grantly found some excuse for sending her girls away, and then began her task. She knew well that she could exercise but very slight authority over her sister. Their various modes of life, and the distance between their residences, had prevented very close confidence. They had hardly lived together since Eleanor was a child. Eleanor had moreover, especially in latter years, resented in a quiet sort of way, the dictatorial authority which the archdeacon seemed to exercise over her father, and on this account had been unwilling to allow the archdeacon's wife to exercise authority over herself.

'You got a letter just before dinner, I believe,' began the eldest sister.

Eleanor acknowledged that she had done so, and felt that she turned red as she acknowledged it. She would have given anything to have kept her colour, but the more she tried to do so, the more she signally failed.

'Was it not from Mr Slope?'

Eleanor said that the letter was from Mr Slope.

'Is he a regular correspondent of yours, Eleanor?'

'Not exactly,' said she, already beginning to feel angry at the cross-examination. She determined, and why it would be difficult to say, that nothing would induce her to tell her sister Susan what was the subject of the letter. Mrs Grantly, she knew, was instigated by the archdeacon, and she would not plead to any arraignment made against her by him.

'But, Eleanor dear, why do you get letters from Mr Slope at all, knowing, as you do, he is a person so distasteful to papa, and to the archdeacon, and indeed to all your friends?'

'In the first place, Susan, I don't get letters from him; and in the next place, as Mr Slope wrote the one letter which I have got, and as I only received it, which I could not very well help doing, as papa handed it to me, I think you had better ask Mr Slope instead of me.'