“Oh, this is quite ideal!” and lapsed into uncomfortable silence.
“Was it some one interesting that made you late?” queried Maud, as her father made no attempt to continue the conversation.
“Very,” he responded; “handsome and interesting.”
“Won’t you tell us about them?” the girl asked, feeling that the word “handsome” contained a covert allusion to her own lack of beauty of which she was extremely sensitive.
“Not now, and I don’t think it would interest you much, anyway. Is your mother indoors?”
The girl nodded and he turned away and disappeared round the corner of the house. She and Latimer sauntered on.
“The handsome and interesting person doesn’t seem to have made your paternal any fuller than usual of the milk of human kindness,” said the young man, whose suit had progressed further than people guessed.
“Popper’s often like that,” said Maud slowly,—and in a prettier and more attractive girl the tone and manner of the remark would have been charmingly plaintive,—“I don’t know what makes him so.”
“He can be more like a patent congealing ice-box when he wants to be than anybody I ever saw. But I don’t see why he should be so to you.”
“I don’t, either, but he is often. He never says anything exactly disagreeable, but he makes me feel sort of—of—mean. Sometimes I think he doesn’t like me at all.”