"Ah! I see that you feel its beauty just as much as if it were not an every-day affair to you," she said, looking at me with another one of those searching glances which she has treated me to several times lately. "No wonder you have grown to look like the place."
"To look like it!" I encouraged her to go on, for a compliment is more food for my soul than all the white hyacinths in a florist's window.
"Surely you look like it," she continued. "You are as patrician looking as the house—and as vivid as the flowers in the yard."
"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "Then I am good-looking?"
"Ann, don't be an idiot! If Aunt Mary had longed for a child as white as snow and as red as blood and as black as the ebony of her embroidery frame, she couldn't have produced anything more exotic than you."
There was a moment of silence in which I thought of the vivid beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb. Of course I am not anything to compare with her! Of course not! But how these vivid beauties care—for some one—when the time comes! Yes; when the time comes. But, dear me, it seems that it is never coming!
"Well, what good does it all do me?" I demanded at length, the long-pent-up storm of restlessness thundering to make itself heard. "Granted that I look as well as you say, and that I live in an earthly paradise—can't you see that there is no—that it is lonesome?"
"You are bored?" she asked sympathetically.
"Yet the summer here is a joy—with oceans of morning-glories and miles of horseback riding!"