"But that's a tremendous exception, Miss Flower. You appreciate that he's one of our leading swains?"
"Oh, is he!" she said, a little disconcerted. "Why—I hope he didn't think I was rude! I thought he was—somebody's father, you see, or uncle...."
Charles Garrott regarded the cousin pleasurably, with no thought of cross-examination. He, the authority, it need scarcely be said, had recognized this girl at sight. Manifestly, she was none other than the Nice Girl, the Womanly Woman, whom he and all moderns were forever holding up to scorn. Doubtless it was merely the increased conservative reaction: but Charles, for the moment, seemed conscious of no scorn in him toward Miss Angela Flower.
The cousin was pretty; not beautiful, no throne-shaker; but pretty, and attractive-looking. Wholly normal she looked, quite engagingly so, with her fine clear skin, smooth dark hair, and large limpid eyes. In her manner there was something soft, simple, and sweet, an ingenuous desire to please and be pleased; Miss Flower was feminine, in short,—it could not be denied. In a company, where the women acted like men, and the men acted like the Third Sex, this girl seemed content to remind you, like her mothers, that she was a woman.
Her conversation, intrinsically speaking, was not remarkable. But—the insidious contrast again—in a Midst where everybody else was conversing remarkably, plain conversation itself became an episode, and a charming one. She spoke of bridge, saying that she and Cousin Mary were hoping to "get up a table" one night very soon; of Mitchellton, where she had lived seven years till September; of the maxixe and the smallness of the house Mary Wing had taken for them; a dozen such un-New simplicities. And then, as she happened to be saying something about the strangeness of the city, "just at first," Charles Garrott exclaimed suddenly, rather pleased:—
"There's a friend of yours, at any rate, Miss Flower—Donald Manford! The last one in the world you'd expect to meet here."
The engineer must have just come in; over bobbing heads, through waving arms, his fine figure and bronzed face had been suddenly glimpsed at the doorway. This young man was another cousin of Mary Wing's; she, indeed, had raised him by hand; and he looked hardly less alien at the Redmantle Club than Miss Angela Flower herself.
To Garrott's astonishment, Miss Flower did not know Donald from Adam.
"Is that Mr. Manford?" she exclaimed, surprised apparently by her cousin's cousin's good looks. "Of course I've known of him for the longest time, but—"
"Why, that's strange—he's like a brother to Mary Wing. But then," said he, reconsidering, "Donald's out of the city half the time, and does nothing but work when he's here."