“Excellent!” agreed her friend, “and to conclude, I am to suppose of course she is such a beauty that she blinds his eyes to all the charms arrayed before him here.”
“Well, we never thought of Gertrude as a beauty exactly; but she is remarkably good looking; all the Lorings are. I would have had her with me for this visit but that her uncle, with whom she lives, has been very ill for months. They, also, are of colonial French descent with, of course, the usual infusions of Anglo-Saxon and European blood supposed to constitute the new American.”
“The new––”
“Yes, you understand, we have yet the original American in our land––the Indian.”
“Ah!” with a gesture of repulsion; “the savages; and then, the Africans! How brave you are, Claire. I should die of fear.”
Mrs. McVeigh only smiled. She was searching through 42 a portfolio, and finally extracted a photograph from other pictures and papers.
“That is Miss Loring,” she said, and handed it to the Countess, who examined it with critical interest.
“Very pretty,” she decided, “an English type. If she were a Parisian, a modiste and hairdresser would do wonders towards developing her into a beauty of the very rare, very fair order. She suggests a slender white lily.”
“Yes, Gertrude is a little like that,” assented Mrs. McVeigh, and placed the photograph on the mantel beside that of the very charming, piquant face of a girl resembling Mrs. McVeigh. It was a picture of her daughter.
“Only six weeks since I left her; yet, it seems like a year,” she sighed; and Fitzgerald Delaven, who had entered from the Lieutenant’s room, sighed ponderously at her elbow.