"Much better."
"I only meant, then, that Mrs. Winthrop did not strike me as at all the sort of person who would allow anything prosaic to interfere with her poetical, heartfelt enthusiasms."
She laughed gayly. "You are delightful. You have such a heavy apparatus for fibbing that it becomes fairly stately. You do not believe I have any enthusiasms at all," she added. Her eyes were dark blue, with long lashes; they were very fine eyes.
"I will believe whatever you please," said John Ford.
"Very well. Believe what I tell you."
"You include only what you tell in words?"
"Plainly, you are not troubled by timidity," said the lady, laughing a second time.
"On the contrary, it is excess of timidity. It makes me desperate and crude."
They had walked on, and now came up with the others. "Does he amuse you?" said Sylvia, in a low tone, as Cousin Walpole in his turn walked onward with the new-comer. "I heard you laughing."
"Yes; but he is not at all what you said. He is so shy and ill at ease that it is almost painful."