Mrs. Loring put up her face-à-main again and looked curiously at her sister.
"Why are you so vexed, Eleanor?" she asked mildly. "After all, it's a brilliant marriage for Morris in a way—Sophy Chesney is a very distinguished woman. Had you ... er ... plans for Morris?"
Mrs. Horton blushed. She had thought that Morris might marry her step-daughter Belinda some day, but she had never admitted this even to herself. Grace's random shot hit home. She retorted rather gruffly:
"Can't a woman take an interest in her own nephew, without being accused of scheming?"
"Oh ... 'scheming'.... My dear Eleanor!" protested her sister.
"The fact is," pursued Mrs. Horton, "I take the common-sense view of the case and you the sentimental one. Linda!... What on earth have you been doing to look so hot?"
This last sentence was addressed to her step-daughter, Belinda Horton, who came racing up the verandah steps, her blowze of red-brown hair blowing out behind her, and a tennis racquet in her hand. Belinda was a triumphantly beautiful hoyden of sixteen, despite a slight powdering of freckles and a tiny silvery scar through one raven black eyebrow, the result of trying to equal a boy cousin on the trapeze when she was nine years old. Her great, rich, challenging red-brown eyes, and her defiant yet sweet-tempered mouth, the up-curve of her round chin, the tilt of her nose, the way her head sat on her shoulders as though some artist-god had flung it there with careless mastery, like a flower—her lovely, long, still-growing body which had never known the "awkward age"—all these things made even the most collected gasp a little when Belinda first rushed upon their sight.
She now dropped upon the steps, near Mrs. Loring, pushed the sleeves of her blouse still higher on her cream-white arms, and flourishing the racquet at her step-mother, said in the rich, throaty voice of a pigeon in the sun:
"What do I look as if I'd been doing? Playing the organ?"
"Linda! Don't talk in that slangy way."