Lord Henry nodded.
"She is rather difficult to manage."
He nodded again.
"She is so full of life, so eager, so—well, can you imagine me at seventeen? Can you picture the mercurial creature I was, with every sense agog, with every nerve on the qui vive?—a dreadful little person in every way."
Lord Henry chuckled, and gave his forelock one or two unusually rapid twists.
"Leonetta is if anything worse than I was," Mrs. Delarayne continued, "for she is of this century. I belonged to the last one. D'you understand?"
He bowed.
"She is vitality incarnate,—wilful, womanly, vain, beautiful,—not more beautiful than Cleopatra, but more intrepid, more inquisitive, more determined to live than her elder sister."
"Have you a photograph of her?" Lord Henry enquired.
Mrs. Delarayne darted across the room, and returned with a large framed photograph which she handed to her visitor.