The Duchess did not explain what she had intended. She was watching the trend also and thinking a good deal. On the whole Lady Lothwell had scarcely expected that she would explain. She rarely did. She seldom made mistakes, however.
Kathryn in her scant gauzy strips of white and silver having drifted towards them at the moment stood looking on with a funny little disturbed expression on her small, tip-tilted face.
“There’s something about her, grandmamma,” she said.
“All the girls see it and no one knows what it is. She’s sitting out for a few minutes and just look at George—and Hal Brunton—and Captain Willys. They are all laughing, of course, and pretending to joke, but they would like to eat each other up. Perhaps it’s her eyelashes. She looks out from under them as if they were a curtain.”
Lady Lothwell’s queer little smile became a queer little laugh.
“Yes. It gives her a look of being ecstatically happy and yet almost shy and appealing at the same time. Men can’t stand it of course.”
“None of them are trying to stand it,” answered little Lady Kathryn somewhat in the tone of a retort.
“I don’t believe she knows she does it,” Lady Lothwell said quite reflectively.
“She does not know at all. That is the worst of it,” commented the Duchess.
“Then you see that there is a worst,” said her daughter.