“Oh, I’ll give it to you any time, Di!” flung back the doctor.
But she did not answer him; she was smiling at Faunce as he held open the door for her to pass out.
“Please come soon and give us a lecture,” she entreated.
He made no reply, but his eyes were bent so intently on her that he entirely missed the girlishly admiring gaze of Fanny Price, who followed her mother and Diane out of the room.
II
Leading the way into the small, old-fashioned drawing-room, Diane seated her guests around the bright fire on the hearth, taking care to select a chair for herself that would put her face in the shadow.
Mrs. Price took the low seat opposite. Her plump, round little body spread out comfortably and settled into the cushions with the genial softness of a pudding. Her lustrous black silk, which the dean approved as “the most suitable and stately dress for a lady,” seemed to billow over the curved arms of the chair, and decorously veiled her white stockings and old-style, low shoes. Fanny, pretty and fair and barely eighteen, with only a suggestion of her mother’s button nose and her father’s tranquil brow under a fluffy mass of fair curls, dropped on a low cushion between the two.
“Isn’t he splendid?” she exclaimed rapturously, clasping her hands. “He’s so handsome—isn’t he, Di? He looks just as I’ve always imagined heroes did!”
“He’s very good-looking, my dear,” her mother admitted amiably. “I couldn’t help thinking of that picture at the seminary—you remember it, Fanny—of David? You must know it too, Diane?”
“I don’t think I’ve noticed it very much,” Diane replied vaguely. “Of course, Mr. Faunce seems a hero just now, and people are making a great deal of his exploits. It’s right that they should; but what hurts me, what seems to me so strange, is the way they forget that Overton led the expedition, that he made all these great discoveries, that it isn’t right to forget him while they’re applauding the things he did.”