"That Mr. Houston seems a very nice young man," observed the worthy dame, patronizingly, and as though speaking to herself, "but what he can see in that girl is beyond me."
Mrs. Clifford squinted. She refused to add to her generally aged and wrinkled appearance by wearing spectacles.
"Isn't she a proper person?" she asked.
Mrs. Clifford had a proper daughter—a very proper daughter—who at that precise moment was sitting prim and solitary on the lowest step of the gallery stairs.
"Well," Mrs. Longpré observed, significantly, "there have been stories. Of course one is quite prepared to hear stories and whether they are true or not one never knows," she added, defensively. "But the girl's mother allows her to have her own way more than I should, if she were my daughter. She is old enough to be his aunt, besides, and always has half-a-dozen young men dancing attendance upon her."
"I suppose it's just another college engagement that will end when he graduates," Mrs. Clifford ventured. "Is the girl in college at all?" she inquired with a smothered yawn.
Mrs. Longpré smiled. "Hardly," she replied, drily. "If she had continued—for she started I am told—she would have graduated quite seven years ago." There was a tart venom in the last speech.
"You don't say," mused Mrs. Clifford who was new to Ann Arbor, her husband, the professor, having been called from a little Ohio college to fill the chair of Norwegian Literature. And she immediately lapsed into another doze from which she did not emerge—being quite stout, and pleasantly stupid—until the orchestra overhead began the last dance—"Home, Sweet Home."
Mrs. Longpré's point-of-view as regarded Jack and Florence was that of nearly all the faculty women who knew them. Indeed, there was but one among them, the jolly little wife of the assistant professor of physics—who did not know much and did not feign more—who championed them. And her support was little more than a mere exclamation at the girl's beauty, now and then at a "reception," or a wide-eyed admiration, feelingly expressed, of Houston's charming manners and exquisitely maintained poise.