“I will send my man up,” said Mr. Manning. “Will you excuse me while I give him the message, and notify my wife that you are here?”
Eugene sat stiffly in his seat. He looked neither to the right nor to the left, and he made only monosyllabic replies to the admiring sentences rippling from the mouth of the curé.
When Mr. Manning re-entered the room escorting his wife, Eugene’s face brightened somewhat. With a grace and a composure that charmed the lady, he rose and stood aside, while monsieur le curé almost prostrated himself before her. Then he, too, made an inflexion of his slender, supple body, and gazed from under his black, drooping eyelashes at the pretty mother of his desired fiancée.
He had never seen her before, and she had never seen him. “Virgie talks a great deal about you,” she said. “Thank you, no, I will not take a chair. Dinner is just about to be announced. Why, you are ever so much older than Virgie. I thought you were quite a young boy.”
Mr. Manning laughed quietly to himself. He was apparently carrying on communications with the curé in dumb show, but in reality he was listening to his wife’s conversation with Eugene.
“I do not feel young,” said Eugene soberly, walking beside the lady out to the brilliant splendor of the dining-room; “at times it seems to me that I have lived my whole life.”
Mrs. Manning was a plump, phlegmatic woman, and by no means sensitive; yet at the boy’s involuntary expression of inward suffering and mental experiences beyond his years, a sympathetic thrill passed over her, and with an expression of pity, she showed him his place at the table.
Eugene caught this expression, and in deep irritation lowered his eyes to his plate. “Why is it,” he reflected bitterly, “that since I came among these Americans I catch their candid ways—I reveal everything? I even think in their language. I will begin to reform at once, now that I am to return to my own country;” and a reform he immediately began according to his own standard. It was easier for him to be composed and reserved at this table than at the Hardys. He sat up very straight in his chair, and in an adroit and delicate manner parried Mrs. Manning’s rather curious questions about his mode of life since his grandfather’s death.
Rather to her own surprise, as their conversation progressed, Mrs. Manning found that she was telling the boy far more about herself than he was telling her about himself. For one thing, she confessed to him her longing to go to Europe; and Eugene said, “It is our misfortune that you have not yet visited us. May we not look forward to the pleasure of soon seeing you in France?”