“How is Tabitha to-day?”
Instantly all pathos, with the touch of dignity that was bred of it, left him and he began to sneer.
“Thank you; that noble and exalted haus-frau appears to be very well. Having paid her morning visit to the kitchen and scolded the cook for extravagance until, I regret to say, she gave notice, she is now seated in her dressing-gown reading a holy German work upon predestination, from which she has been so good as to translate to me some passages that appeared to her to bear directly upon my spiritual future. But I didn’t send for you to talk about my wife and her grotesque views. Rupert Ullershaw is back, is he not?”
She nodded.
“Tell me about him. What is he like?”
“Tall, strong, handsome in a kind of way, except for his untidy hair and the lines upon his brow, which make him look as though he had been trying to solve an acrostic for ten years, old looking for his age, awkward in his manner and slow of speech.”
“A good portrait,” he said approvingly, “of the outside. Now for the in.”
Edith rubbed her forehead, as was her manner when deliberating.
“That’s hard,” she answered, “for how can one describe what one doesn’t understand? But I’ll try just to get him into my mind as I see him. I think—well, I think that he is very much the sort of man you said just now you would like your sons to be, if you had any.”
Lord Devene started as though something had pricked him.