"Margaret was always brilliant," said her aunt.
"Oh, extremely!" said Madame Ferri.
"Only people never found it out," added Miss Harrison.
She herself maintained a calm and uninquiring demeanor. Sometimes she was with her niece and her niece's supposed suitor, and sometimes not. She continued to receive him with the same affability which she had bestowed upon him from the first, and occasionally she invited him to dinner and to drive. She made no comment upon the frequency of his visits, or the length of his conversations upon the little balcony in the evening, where the plash of the fountain came faintly up from below. In truth she had no cause for solicitude; nothing could be more tranquil than the tone of the two talkers. Nothing more was said about Mrs. Lovell; conversation had sunk back into the old impersonal channel.
"You are very even," Morgan said one evening. "You do not seem to have any moods. I noticed it last year."
"One is even," she replied, "when one is—"
"Indifferent," he suggested.
She did not contradict him.
Two things she refused to do: she would not sing, and she would not go to the Boboli Garden.
"As I am especially fond of those tall, ceremonious old hedges and serene statues, you cut me off from a real pleasure," said Morgan.