"Oh, don't worry about me," replied Susan. "I want to say a few words to Oliver, and then I'm coming up to see Harry. Harry appears to me to be a man of personality."
"He's a darling child," replied Mrs. Pendleton, a little vaguely, "and Jinny says she never saw him so headstrong before. He is usually as good as gold."
"Well, well, it's a fine family," said the rector, beaming upon his son-in-law, when they returned from the passage. "I never saw three healthier children. It's a pity you lost the other one," he added in a graver tone, "but as he lived such a short time, Virginia couldn't take it so much to heart as if he had been older. She seems to have got over the disappointment."
"Yes, I think she's got over it," said Oliver.
"It will be good for her to be back in Dinwiddie. I never felt satisfied to think of her so far away."
"Yes, I'm glad we could come back," agreed Oliver pleasantly, though he appeared to Susan's quick eye to be making an effort.
"By the way, I haven't spoken of your literary work," remarked the rector, with the manner of a man who is saying something very agreeable. "I have never been to the theatre, but I understand that it is losing a great deal of its ill odour. I always remember when anything is said about the stage that, after all, Shakespeare was an actor. We may be old-fashioned in Dinwiddie," he pursued in the complacent tone in which the admission of this failing is invariably made, "but I don't think we can have any objection to sweet, clean plays, with an elevating moral tone to them. They are no worse, anyway, than novels."
Though Oliver kept his face under such admirable control, Susan, glancing at him quickly, saw a shade of expression, too fine for amusement, too cordial for resentment, pass over his features. His colour, which was always high, deepened, and raising his head, he brushed the smooth dark hair back from his forehead. Through some intuitive strain of sympathy, Susan understood, while she watched him, that his plays were as vital a matter in his life as the children were in Virginia's.
"I must run up and see Harry before he goes to sleep," she said, feeling instinctively that the conversation was becoming a strain.
At the allusion to his grandson, the rector's face lost immediately its expression of forced pleasantness and relapsed into its look of genial charm.