“Castellani! Yes, that is the name I heard. What a pretty name! And what is he like? Do tell me all about him, Aunt Mildred.”
She turned to the woman as the more likely to give her a graphic description. The average man is an undescribing animal.
Mildred made an effort at self-command before she spoke. Castellani counted for but little in her recent trouble. His revelation had been an accident, and its effect entirely dissociated from him. Yet the very thought of the man troubled her, and the dread of seeing him again was like a physical pain.
“I do not know what to say about his appearance,” she answered presently, slowly fanning herself with a great scarlet Japanese fan, pale and cool looking in her plain white gown with its black ribbons. The very picture of domestic peace, one would suppose, judging by externals only. “I suppose there are people who would think him handsome.”
“Don’t you, aunt?”
“No. I don’t like the colour of his eyes or of his hair. They are of that reddish-brown which the Venetian painters are so fond of, but which always gives me an idea of falsehood and treachery. Mr. Castellani is a very clever man, but he is not a man whom I could ever trust.”
“How nice!” cried Pamela, her face radiant with enthusiasm; “a creature with red-brown hair, and eyes with a depth of falsehood in them. That is just the kind of man who might be the author of Nepenthe. If you had told me he was stout and rosy-cheeked, with pepper-and-salt whiskers and a fine, benevolent head, I would never have opened his book again.”
“You seem to admire this Nepenthe prodigiously,” said her uncle, looking at her with a calmly critical air. “Is it because the book is the fashion, or from your own unassisted appreciation of it? I did not think you were a bookish person.”
“I’m not,” cried Pamela. “I am a mass of ignorance. I don’t know anything about science. I don’t know the name of a single butterfly. I don’t know one toadstool from another. But when I love a book it is a passion with me. My Keats has tumbled to pieces; my Shelley is disgracefully dirty. I have read Nepenthe six times, and I am waiting for the cheap edition, to keep it under my pillow. It has made me an Agnostic.”
“Do you know the dictionary meaning of that word?”