There was a silence while she replaced the vase on the bracket.
“You gave too much for it,” said Marcus, refusing to be beaten, or to be made to say wrong was right—or to be touched by the thought of the foolish old lady who had been taken in—so kindly.
“How do you know?” asked Elsie. “What, after all, was too much to pay for a thing she wanted, that would make her happy? She could afford to pay. Anyhow, she left the vase to me and I put it there.” She nodded to the bracket on the wall.
“A very bad place for it.”
“I like it there,” said Elsie, and Marcus knew he had been right; pig-headed and obstinate was Diana’s aunt.
“Where is Diana?” he asked.
“She’s reading aloud Mr. Watkins’s poems.”
“To whom?”
“To Mr. Watkins—she says he reads them in a family-prayer sort of a voice that lends them a fictitious value. She wants him to hear what they sound like read by an ordinary person.”
Of course, Marcus at once said Diana was not an ordinary person, and Elsie could only answer that she read poetry like a very ordinary person.