As they went down the deck the little man peered at everyone with a nervous little smile—“as if he were saying, ‘Don’t kick me, please. I mean well,’” thought Frothingham. In fact, back of the peering and the smile was the desire that all should see that he had captured the Earl. They entered the library and advanced toward a young woman swathed in a huge blue cape, her eyes idly upon a book.
“Honoria, my dear,” said Longview, as uneasy as if he were speaking to the young woman without having been introduced to her, “you remember Lord Frothingham?”
Honoria slowly raised her eyelids from a pair of melancholy, indifferent grey eyes, and slightly inclined her head. The men seated themselves on either side of her; Longview rattled on in his almost hysterical way for a few minutes, then fluttered away. Honoria and Frothingham sat silent, she looking at her book, he looking at her.
“You are going home?” he said when he saw that she would not “lead,” no matter how long the silence might continue.
“No,” she replied. “We are English—at least, my father is.”
“And you?”
She just moved her shoulders, and there was the faintest sneer at the corner of her decidedly pretty mouth. “I don’t know—what does it matter about a woman? I’ve lived in England and France since I was five, except a year and a half in America. Father detests the country and the people. He was naturalised in England last year. I believe he decided that his social position, won through his being an American, was sufficiently established to make it safe for him to change.”
Frothingham smiled. As he was used to the freest and frankest criticisms of parents and other near relatives by fellow-countrymen of his own class, it did not impress him as unfilial that a daughter should thus deride a father. Honoria became silent, and apparently oblivious of his presence.
“I’ve never been to America,” he said, hoping to resurrect the dead conversation. “I’m looking forward to it with much pleasure. We have many Americans in our neighbourhood—such jolly people.”
“I know few Americans.” Honoria looked disdainful. “And they are like us, the most of them—expatriated. They say their country is a good place to make money in, but a horrible place to live—crude and ill-mannered, full of vulgar people that push in everywhere, and the servants fancying they’re ladies and gentlemen.”