As she held the cream jug poised above his coffee cup Mrs. Trent smiled back at him with a placid wonder.
"Who is she, my son? A lady—I mean a real one?"
"Oh, yes, sterling."
"But she writes verse you say! Is it improper?"
His eyes shone with amusement. "Improper! Why, what an idea!"
"I'm sure I don't know how it is," responded his mother, carefully measuring with her eye the correct allowance of cream, "but somehow women always seem to get immodest when they take to verse. It's as if they went into it for the express purpose of airing their improprieties."
"I say!" he exclaimed, with gentle mockery, "have you been reading 'Sappho' at your age?"
She continued to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it was hardly the kind of thing you would recite to a lady."
Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.
"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand her."