“Of what, pray?”
“That I am not a little insignificance to be passed by with indulgence.”
“Should you prefer severity?” and Perior, conscious that she had succeeded in “drawing” him, could not repress “You are an outrageous little egotist, Camelia.”
Camelia, her hands clasped over her knee, contemplated him with more gravity than he had expected.
“No,” she demurred, “selfish, but not egotistic. There is a difference, isn’t there? Egotism is subjective, selfishness objective. I wonder,” she added, “what you do think of me. Not that I care—much! Am I not frank? I must care, since I am shuffling about before you; getting a cuffing for my pains!” She rose suddenly, laughing, not in the least bitterly, and walked to the window.
“Mamma and Mary,” she announced. “Did Frances evade them? They disconcert her. Frances, you know, goes in for knowingness—cleverness—the modern vice. Don’t you hate clever people? Frances doesn’t dare talk epigrams to me; I can’t stand it. You saw a lot of Mamma and Mary last winter, didn’t you? Took Mary out riding. Now, come here, Mr. Perior, and tell me how she looked on horseback.”
Camelia was smiling irrepressibly as he joined her, and they watched the approach of the two ladies across the lawn. Certainly the angular, thick-set form of the younger gave no hint of pleasing possibilities under circumstances so trying as the equestrian.
“I never could wheedle Mary into the saddle. I should like to see her on horseback immensely.” Camelia’s eyes twinkled: “A sort of cowering desperation, wasn’t it?”
“No, she rode rather nicely,” said Perior concisely. There was something rather brutal in Camelia’s comments as she stood there with such rhythmic loveliness of pose and contour.
“I wish Mary did not look so much like a milk pudding,” she went on; “a raisinless milk pudding—so sane, so formless, so uneventful.”