“What a pleasing aggregate!” said I. “Mary, what do you make of Mrs. Harter?”
“Sincere, Unhappy, Reserved, Ill-tempered, Undisciplined.”
“It’s queer,” said Martyn. “We’ve all been impressed by that woman more or less. And yet we’ve all noticed different things about her.”
“Two people said she was common,” Sallie pointed out.
“I don’t agree.”
“Well,” said Dolly Kendal, “it’s not a very nice thing to say about anyone, is it?”
This comment did not materially add to the value of the discussion and met with no rejoinder.
“Mrs. Harter is common,” said Claire, with that air of finality with which she invests an assertion of her own opinion, particularly when it is contrary to that held by other people. “But she has personality. That’s why we’re all discussing her, I suppose—old Ellison’s daughter!”
“She doesn’t look like old Ellison’s daughter,” Martyn observed, replying, perhaps, rather to the spirit than to the letter of Claire’s assertion. “It was a stroke of genius on his part to have christened his daughter Diamond.”
Sallie looked intelligently inquiring.