“Oh, you wouldn’t recognise it,” was the quick retort. “‘Like to like’ they say; and I never find it is any use employing anything but my silliest and most idiotic manner and expression with you.
“But with Lawrence, of course,” running on mischievously, “it is only the high-souled and the deeply intellectual that he is in the least at home with. Witness his companion last night, with whom he was so engrossed he could not even stop and shake hands with old friends from cradlehood.”
“To tell you the honest truth,” said Lawrence, “my cousin, Miss Harcourt, had got so thoroughly into the swing of some extraordinary harangue, which required nothing but an ejaculation every five minutes from me, and seemed to go delightfully on without any further attention whatever, that it would have been downright cruelty to interrupt such a happy state of affairs. I knew I should be seeing you all to-day, and at the last moment my heart failed me. I might add that the harangue lasted until we got home, and a final ejaculation on the door-step, with a fervent ‘by Jove,’ satisfied, her beyond my best expectations. If my life had depended upon it, I could not have told anyone what she had been talking about.”
“It must simplify life tremendously, to have such a perfect indifference to good manners,” said Paddy, who could never resist a possible dig at Lawrence.
To her, he was the essence of self-satisfied superiority, and she apparently considered it one of her missions in life to bring him down to earth as much as possible. Lawrence found it on the whole amusing, and was not above sparring with her.
“You are improving,” he remarked, with a condescension he knew would annoy her; “that is a really passable retort for you.”
“I am glad that you saw the point. I was a little afraid you might have grown more dense than ever, after being absent from Ireland so long.”
“Ah! Lawrence Blake!” exclaimed a voice close at hand, as the General and Mrs Adair joined them from a side walk. “How are you? I’m very glad to see you back again. We all are, I’m sure,” and he bowed with old-world courtliness.
Lawrence thanked him, and walked on a few paces with Mrs Adair to answer her warm inquiries for his mother and sisters.
Afterward he told them about the dance to take place shortly, for his sisters’ “coming out” and left Paddy doing a sort of Highland Fling with Jack round the tennis court to let off her excitement. She tried to make her sister join in, but Eileen only smiled a little wistfully, and when no one was looking, stole off by herself to the seat down by the water, where Lawrence had found her in the afternoon.