Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in their own epoch.
“My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won’t say dabbler—seeker-after.”
“Not after impressions,” said Damier, smiling a little sadly.
“And have you not found anything?” she asked.
“No; I don’t think I have.”
“Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!” smiled Mrs. Mostyn. “You have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by—how many years?—fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,—the daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,—and you might find there an adventure of the heart.”
“Ah, I don’t care about a daughter—or about an adventure.”
Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said presently:
“Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara’s brother,—a man I never liked,—and she could ask him.”
“Pray do.”