"Tell me stories, Henrietta, please," she entreated, "about all the people whom you've asked to your party on Thursday. Dress them up for me and put them through their paces, so that I may know who they all are when I see them and make no mistakes, but behave to them just as you would wish me to."
"Gradate your attentions and not pet the wrong ones?"
Mrs. Frayling gave gentle squeeze for squeeze in the pussy-warmth, laughing a trifle impishly.
"You sinful child," she said—"Gracious, what jolts—my spine will soon be driven through the top of my skull at this rate!—Yes, sinful in tempting me to gibbet my acquaintances for your amusement."
"But why gibbet them? Aren't they nice, don't you care for them?"
"Prodigiously, of course. Yet would you find it in the least interesting or illuminating if I indexed their modest virtues only?"
"I think the old soldier found it both interesting and illuminating when you indexed my father's virtues just now."
"Sir Charles's virtues hardly come under the head of modest ones," Mrs. Frayling threw off almost sharply. "Give me someone as well worth acclaiming and I'll shout with the best! But you scarcely quote your father as among the average, do you?—The people whom you'll meet on Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye on the Church, the other on the world. The permanent inconsistency of her attitude, as I may say her permanent squint, gives her a certain cachet without which she'd be a positive blank.—She is most anxious to meet you, by the way, and Sir Charles—always supposing he is self-sacrificing enough to come—because she knows connections of his and yours at Harchester, a genial pillar of the Church in the form of an Archdeacon, in whom, as I gather, her dear dead Lord Bishop very much put his trust."
"Tom Verity's father, I suppose," Damaris murmured, her colour rising, the hint of a cloud too upon her brow.
"And who may Tom Verity be?" Mrs. Frayling, noting both colour and cloud, alertly asked.