“Well, I’m glad you liked that painter.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Eliot said. “I talked it over with him, and I’m afraid he agreed with you instead of with me. Naturally, he would, though! I was quite interested in him.”
“You were?”
“Yes—such an unexpected type.”
“Well, no,” Mr. Eliot said. “Nobody’s an unexpected type nowadays. Isn’t Muriel coming down at all?”
“Jennie’s been up for her twice,” his wife informed him. “I suppose she’ll come eventually. She’s cross this morning.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I just asked her if she couldn’t be a little fairer to a certain somebody. I suppose I’d better not have mentioned it, because it made her very peevish.”
Upon this, Muriel made her entrance swiftly enough to let her mother know that the last words had been overheard, an advantage the daughter could not forego. She took her place at the table opposite to her gourmandizing little brother Robert, and in silence permitted her facial expression alone to mention what she thought of a mother who called her “peevish” when she was not present to defend herself.
Only a moment before, she had been thrilled inexpressibly: the black-and-white stranger, so mysteriously spoken of by her parents, was indeed a painter. That proved his You-ness, proved everything! Her whole being (as she would have said) shook with the revelation, and her anxiety to hear more of him was consuming; but the word “peevish” brought about an instantaneous reversion. She entered the dining-room in an entirely different mood, for her whole being was now that of a daughter embattled with a parent who attacks unfairly—so intricately elastic are the ways of our whole beings!