"Brignoli used to be divine as Lionel," says Marcia. "I don't believe I should like another person in that rôle. Of course madame is making a great sensation in New York. What a wonderfully handsome woman she is, and—do you remember, Gertrude, whether any one ever made any great fuss about her in her youth?"
Gertrude colors at this thrust of ancient memory.
"She is the handsomest woman I ever saw," begins Eugene, and his glance falls upon Violet. "Of course she was handsome always, and you need not hint enviously of a lost youth, Marcia. She looks younger than any of you girls to-day. There wasn't one at Newport who could hold a candle to her. The men were mowed down 'n swaths. Not one could stand before her."
"Then I say she is a coquette," is Marcia's decisive reply. "I dare say there will be no end of dinners and Germans and lovers. It's fearfully mean in Laura not to take a house for the winter and invite a body down. It is horrid dull here! Floyd, do you mean to stay up all winter?"
"Why not? I have not spent a winter here since I was a boy, in the old farm-house with Aunt Marcia."
"What an awful place it was!" Marcia is quite forgetting her rôle of severe high art. "I believe she always chose the coldest days in winter and the warmest days in summer to invite us. I don't see how you endured it!"
"I not only endured it," says Floyd, meditatively, "but I liked it."
"Well, one might like it with a fortune in the background," Eugene rejoins, with covert insolence.
The dessert is being brought in, which causes a lull in the family strictures. Floyd frowns and is silent. When they rise, Cecil runs to the drawing-room, and the two follow her.
"Play a little," says her husband; and Violet sits down, thinking of the handsome woman she has never yet seen, but who seems to have bewitched all the family.