"Your poor mother!"
"Oh, she likes it."
"Humph! And that young man—does he never get tired of his own works?"
"It isn't his works that he's reading. It's other people's—to make him forget the way they murder the play at rehearsal. It's French things they read, usually." Genie hurried on with a nervous attempt to be diverting. "There's a new poet, did you know? I like the new ones best, don't you? What I can't stand is when they are so ancient, that they're like that decayed old Ronsard—"
The form Mrs. Mathew's literary criticism took was a violent shake of the visitor's coat. Out of the folds dropped a note. It was addressed in Genie's hand to Mr. Chester Keith.
"What foolishness is this—"
"Don't tell mother," prayed the girl, trying in vain to recover the envelope.
Mrs. Mathew's face grew graver as she took in the girl's feverish anxiety.
"Dear Aunt Josephine!" Genie slipped her hand coaxingly through the arm of the forbidding-looking lady. "I know you wouldn't be so unkind. For all mother seems so gentle and you sometimes look so severe, you're ten times as forgiving, really, as mother is. You're more broadminded," said the unblushing flatterer.