‘What don’t you like?’
‘Why, that tie. It won’t do at all. Your taste is generally very good, but that tie! I’ll choose one for you to-morrow, and let you have it the next time you come. Do you know, I’ve been thinking that it might be well if you parted your hair in the middle. I don’t care for it as a rule; but in your case, with your soft, beautiful hair, I think it would look well. Shall we try? Wait a minute; I’ll run for a comb.’
‘But suppose some one came—’
‘Nobody will come, my dear boy. Hardly any one knows I’m here. I like to get away from people now and then; that’s why I’ve taken refuge in this cock-loft.’
She disappeared, and came back with a comb of tortoise-shell.
‘Sit down there. Oh, what hair it is, to be sure! Almost as fine as my own. I think you’ll have a delicious moustache.’
Her personal appearance was quite in keeping with this vivacity. Rather short, and inclining—but as yet only inclining—to rotundity of figure, with a peculiarly soft and clear complexion, Mrs. Damerel made a gallant battle against the hostile years. Her bright eye, her moist lips, the admirable smoothness of brow and cheek and throat, bore witness to sound health; as did the rows of teeth, incontestably her own, which she exhibited in her frequent mirth. A handsome woman still, though not of the type that commands a reverent admiration. Her frivolity did not exclude a suggestion of shrewdness, nor yet of capacity for emotion, but it was difficult to imagine wise or elevated thought behind that narrow brow. She was elaborately dressed, with only the most fashionable symbols of widowhood; rings adorned her podgy little hand, and a bracelet her white wrist. Refinement she possessed only in the society-journal sense, but her intonation was that of the idle class, and her grammar did not limp.
‘There—let me look. Oh, I think that’s an improvement—more distingue. And now tell me the news. How is your father?’
‘Very bad, I’m afraid,’ said Horace, when he had regarded himself in a mirror with something of doubtfulness. ‘Nancy says that she’s afraid he won’t get well.’
‘Oh, you don’t say that! Oh, how very sad! But let us hope. I can’t think it’s so bad as that.’