“Oh, ah, yes—I mean your step-daughter’s,”—floundered Vernon, more perplexed than ever. If she did not care about the girl, why this anger? “You must all be so much accustomed to the admiration Miss Denison excites that even an eccentric tribute may, I hope, be excused.”
With masculine want of tact he was getting deeper and deeper into the mire. Mrs. Denison’s cold, pale, plump face grew every moment more forbidding.
“The place is not so overrun with admirers of Olivia Denison as you seem to imagine,” said she, acidly. “There is nothing the matter with the girl’s face; on the other hand, we are not accustomed to consider it anything to rave about. We Londoners like beauty of a more delicate type.”
“If by delicate you mean puny and pale,” said Vernon, with rash honesty, “you certainly won’t get us up here to agree with you. But if you mean refined, I can’t imagine a face more ideally satisfying in that respect than Miss Denison’s.”
This was the last straw. The one consolation Mrs. Denison always had ready for herself on the irritating subject of Olivia’s beauty was that her own flaccid paleness made the girl’s bright coloring look “vulgar.” She had made her entrance in an aggressive mood; every word the unfortunate man had uttered had increased her prejudice against him, and had seemed specially designed for her annoyance. Inflamed by sullen anger, and rushing to the favorite conclusion of the ill-bred that she had been “insulted,” Mrs. Denison let loose upon her guest the vials of her wrath. She had just enough sense of decency not to get loud in her anger; but her thin, compressed lips and coldly venomous grey eyes struck a sort of terror into the unsuspecting clergyman, before her slow words came like the crash of a thunderbolt upon his ears. Mrs. Denison prefaced her speech by a hard, short laugh that scarcely moved the muscles of her flabby face.
“I suppose your taste still runs in the same direction that it did ten years ago then, and that you admire red-cheeked farmers’ daughters as much as ever?”
“I don’t understand you, madam,” said Vernon, growing paler than ever, if that were possible, but losing his nervousness in the face of this preposterous attack.
His recovered self-possession irritated Mrs. Denison, who had expected him to cower under her onslaught. Although she was already growing alarmed at what she had done, she was too sullenly obstinate to draw back, and she strengthened herself, even while her breath came faster and a slight flush came over her face, with the conviction that she was unmasking villainy, and putting to rout a man who was a disgrace to his sacred calling.
“Indeed, I should have thought that in this house, of all others, your memory would have been better.”
As Mrs. Denison had remained standing, Vernon had perforce done the same. He now took a step to the left, so that the light might fall on his face as well as on hers as he answered her.