“What a nice Alceste you are this morning!” she said. “Tell me, what are you doing with yourself down here? Growing more and more of the stoic? I expect some day to hear that you have left the Grange and moved into a tub. How do you get on without your pupil?” and Camelia as she stood before him made ever so faint a little dancing step backwards and forwards, expressive of her question’s merriment.
“I have existed—more comfortably perhaps than when I had her.”
“Now tell me, be sincere,” she came close to him, her own gay steadiness of look exemplary in the quality she recommended, “Are you crunchingly disapproving? Ready to bite me? Have you heard dreadful tales of frivolity and worldliness?”
“Not more than are becoming to a pretty young woman with such capacities for enjoyment.”
“You don’t disapprove then?”
“Of what, my dear Camelia?”
“Of my determination to enjoy myself.”
“Why should I? Why shouldn’t you have your try like the rest of us? I am not going to throw cold water on your laudable aspirations.”
Camelia still looked at him steadily, smilingly, and a little mockingly. Their eyes at these close quarters could but show a consciousness of familiarity that made evasions funny. Camelia’s eyes were gray, the sunlit gray of a brook—reflecting broken browns and greens, yeux pailletés, as changing as her smile; and Perior’s eyes, too, were gray, but the fixed, stony gray that is altogether another color, and they contemplated her fluctuations with an apparently unmoved, though smiling calm.
She laughed outright, and then Perior permitted himself a dry little responsive laugh that left his lips unparted.