At last Miss Carrington laid her book across her knee and watched Kit’s movements, frankly inviting confidence. Becoming conscious of this, he brought himself up with his elbow on the mantel and, turning toward her, said in that big, cheery voice of his that the old lady never could hear without thrilling to it:
“I beg your pardon, Aunt Anne! Do I give you the willies doing the zoo-tiger act like this?”
“I don’t know their Christian name—though why jungle ways should have a Christian name I don’t see—but if irritated nerves are willies, then, yes, you give them to me,” said his aunt.
She spoke in a light, slightly acrid voice, her syllables articulated like Italian.
Kit laughed.
“Nice Aunt Anne!” he approved her, impersonally. “You always sit on a chap in a delightful way. I’ll be seated, thanks.”
He dropped into the deep chair on the right of the fireplace, stretching out to his great length. But Miss Carrington saw that he at once possessed himself of the tongs and began to open and shut them in a way as tiresome as his roaming had been.
Kit nervous? This hearty, athletic lad fidgeting? Miss Carrington wondered what was on his mind. Being clever she set out to discover indirectly. She had heard a suggestion that she loathed; it had come from Minerva, her maid, and Minerva, true to her name, was, as a rule, right.
Miss Carrington closed her book, first noting the page number, for she scorned bookmarks, laid it on the table, and picked up the latest number of a newspaper supplement devoted to book news.
“Here’s a discussion of Richard Latham’s verse and essays, Kit,” she said. “Quite well done, discriminating, yet laudatory. The reviewer—it’s not signed—considers him an artist who sends out nothing unworthy, who greatly rejoices those of fine perception, consequently the few, yet these to an extent that should compensate him for the smallness of his audience. Really it is praise worth having! I don’t know Richard Latham as I should. I sent Minerva off after I’d read this to buy everything he has published. Cleavedge had only one volume, the one I already owned! So I sent her again to telephone New York, to tell Brentano’s to send me Latham complete. That is the honour of a prophet in his own country!”