“Mamma! What a huge joke! Harry impressionable!”
“He is, I assure you, Rose. I presume I know my own son.”
“Well, at any rate, he is not worse than the rest. Young men nowadays neither love nor hate. Their love is iced on prudence, and their hatreds have not a particle of courage. I wish I had been born one hundred years ago. I have the heart for a real man.”
“You flatter yourself, Rose. You are the very triumph of respectable commonplace. And as for one hundred years ago, the follies of that date were just as innumerable as our own.”
“You think I am respectably commonplace, mamma. Then let me tell you, I must be a consummate actress. I do not think you know Rose Filmer. I do not think I know her myself. I hope I have some individuality.”
“Individuality! There is nothing more vulgar. I hear Parry with the carriage; will you drive with me?”
“No; I shall answer Adriana’s letter, and get the subject off my mind. It is so much easier to know what you dislike to do than to be sure of what you like. Where are you going?”
“To McCreery’s. I want some lace.”
“Do buy the real article then. It is the chic thing now, to wear real lace, and it does look supreme, among the miles of imitation that are used.”
Then Rose went to the library to answer Adriana’s letter. It pleased her to think it an important decision, and she sat some time with the pen in her hand, and a judicial air on her beautiful countenance. For 11 she was undeniably a very attractive girl, as she sat in the sunshine that morning, deliberating on Adriana’s “deception”; there being to a practiced observer many alluring contradictions in her face and manner. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat, her eyes almond-shaped, blue and limpid; her cheeks and chin dimpled; her mouth rosy and full; her figure supple; her feet small, finely dressed, and quite in view; her whole appearance that of a lovely innocent girl, on the threshold of life. But this exquisite seeming contained possibilities of evil, as well as good. Her dress was full of studied effects, her manners of attitudes and languors; and her charming way of dropping her blue eyes, and then suddenly flashing them open, was a conscious, and not a natural, grace. Even her sweet credulousness had in it an equal capacity for seductive wilfulness and petulance. Nor was she unconscious of this double nature within her; for she had often said to Adriana, “I feel as if there were twenty different girls in me—and the majority of them bad.”