HE made his way diffidently through a long window to the lawn; where he saw his sister, a glimmering, whitish shape in the heavily overgrown garden, conversing with a figure without form or detail, by a trellis sagging beneath a verdurous weight.
“Oh, Tony!” she called; “here's Mrs. Dreen.”
He leaned forward awkwardly, and grasped a slim, jewelled hand. “I didn't know you were back from France,” he told the indistinct woman before him.
“But you read that Mr. Dreen had resigned the consulship at Lyons,” a delicate, rounded voice rejoined, “and you should have guessed that we would come home to Ellerton. My dear Ellie,” she turned to the girl, “you have no idea how delighted James is at being here once more. He has given the farmer notice, and insists that he is going to cultivate his own acres. He was up this morning at six; fancy, after France and his late déjeuner. And Eliza adores it; she spends the day with a gardener, planning flowerbeds.”
Anthony slipped into an easy posture on the thick, damp sod. Although he had not seen Mrs. James Dreen since his childhood, when she had accompanied her husband abroad to a consular post, he still retained a pleasant memory of her magnetic and precise charm, the memory of her harmonious personality, the beauty of her apparel and rings.
“How is Eliza?” he asked politely, and with no inward interest; “she must be a regular beauty by now.”
“No,” Mrs. Dreen returned crisply, “she is not particularly goodlooking, but she has always told me the truth. Eliza is a dear.” Anthony lit a cigarette, and flipped the match in a minute gold arc, extinguished in the night.
“I am decidedly uneasy about Eliza though,” she continued to Ellie; “to tell the truth, I am not sure how she will take over here. She is a serious child; I would say temperamental, but that's such an impossible word. She is absolutely and transparently honest and outspoken—it's ghastly at times. The most unworldly person alive; with her thought and action are one, and often as not her thoughts are appalling. All that, you know, doesn't spell wisdom for a girl.”
“Yet James and I couldn't bear to... make her harder. A great deal of care... If she is my daughter, Ellie, she is exquisite—so sensitive, sympathetic...”
Anthony, absorbed in the misfortune that had overtaken the machine shop, the impending, inevitable interview with his father, so justly rigorous, hardly gathered the sense of Mrs. Dreen's discourse. Occasional phrases, familiar and unfamiliar terms, pierced his abstraction.—“Colombin's.” “James' siatica.” “Camille Marchais.” Then her words, centering about a statement that had captured his attention, became coherent, significant.