Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby’s, hugely amused him.
“So you like Chaucer?” Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very uncomfortable. “Strong meat that for babes,” Lord Calverly added, looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant vagueness.
“Never read it,” she replied briskly; “not to remember. If I had had literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently.”
Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as “improper” showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm and wonder. Alicia’s expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly’s appreciative monocle—the monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a child’s quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda’s glad face.
“I’m sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?”
He shook hands, smiling at them.
“Don’t, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring,” called the Captain; “they can find their way to the garden without an escort.”
“But it won’t put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if I couldn’t,” and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious and hesitating.
Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not interest her, but she found Alicia’s low, musical laughter, and the enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly’s half-muffled utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well in her journal.
“He is probably flattering her,” thought Katherine; “that is what she likes best.”