And as the girl warmly agreed:
"Ah! I am so very glad you appreciate him.—And you have yet to hear him sing! That takes one by storm, I confess—Unhappy Maud Callowgas!—But you see how frightfully on edge he is—how he turns off for no valid reason, imagines himself a failure, imagines himself out of it? In point of fact he plays a quite passable game of tennis—and you heard what he said? These fits of depression and self-depreciation amount to being tragic. One requires endless tact to manage him and save him from himself."
Henrietta paused, sighed, sitting on the stool before her toilette table, neatly placing tortoiseshell hairpins, patting and adjusting her bright brown hair.
"I could have bitten my tongue out for making that wretched slip about the coffee cups; but I was off my guard for once. And like all artistic people Marshall is a little absent-minded—absorbed to the point of not seeing exactly what he is doing.—Poor young man, I sometimes tremble for his future. Such a highly strung, sensitive nature amounts almost to a curse. If he got into wrong hands what mightn't the end be?—Catastrophe, for he is capable of fatal desperation. And I must own men—with the exception of my husband who is simply an angel to him—do not always understand and are not quite kind to him. He needs a wise loving woman to develop the best in him—there is so very much which is good—and to guide him."
"Well," Damaris said, and that without suspicion of irony, "dearest
Henrietta, hasn't he you?"
Mrs. Frayling took up the ivory hand-glass, and sitting sideways on the dressing-stool, turned her graceful head hither and thither, to obtain the fuller view of her back hair.
"Me? But you forget, I have other claims to satisfy. I can't look after him for ever. I must find him a wife I suppose; though I really shall be rather loath to give him up. His gratitude and loneliness touch me so much," she said, looking up and smiling, with a little twist in her mouth, as of playful and unwilling resignation, captivating to see.
By which cajoleries and expression of praiseworthy sentiment, Henrietta raised herself notably in Damaris' estimation—as she fully intended to do. Our maiden kissed her with silent favour; and, mysteries of the toilette completed, more closely united than ever before—that is, since the date of the elder's second advent—the two ladies, presenting the prettiest picture imaginable, went downstairs again, gaily, hand in hand.