He met her eye an instant, and she saw that he was fully cognizant of her sarcasm. “As you please,� he replied unmoved.
She felt herself rebuked again, and her anger kindled unreasonably against the man who was smarting under her treatment. She went to the table, and taking a sheet of folded note-paper wrote a receipt and signed it, handing it to him with a slight haughty inclination of the head which was at once an acknowledgment and a dismissal.
But again he met her with composure. He took the paper, folded it twice and put it in his pocketbook, then he bade her good evening and, passing Eaton with scarcely a glance, bowed to Colonel Royall and went out, his awkward figure in its rough tweed suit having made a singular effect in the old-fashioned elegance of Colonel Royall’s house, an effect that fretted Diana’s pride, for it had seemed to her that, as he passed, he had overshadowed her own father and dwarfed Jacob Eaton. Yet, at the time, she thought of none of these things. She pushed the offending pennies across the table.
“Cousin Jinny,� she said carelessly, “there are some Peter pence for your dago beggars.�
Cousin Jinny gathered up the pennies and dropped them thoughtfully into the little gold-linked purse on her chatelaine. For years she had been contributing a yearly subsidy to the ever increasing family of a former gondolier, the unforgotten grace of whose slender legs had haunted her memory for twenty years, during which period she had been the recipient of annual announcements of twins and triplets, whose arrivals invariably punctuated peculiarly unremunerative years.
“That man,� she said, referring to Trench and not the gondolier, “that man is an anarchist.�
Mrs. Eaton had a settled conviction that all undesirable persons were anarchists. To her nebulous vision innumerable immigrant ships were continually unloading anarchists in bulk, as merchantmen might unship consignments of Sea Island cotton or Jamaica rum; and every fresh appearance of the social unwashed was to her an advent of an atom from these incendiary cargoes.
“I hope you were careful about your receipt, Diana,� said Jacob Eaton, stopping to light a cigarette at the tall candelabrum on the piano. “How far did your admirer walk to bring that consignment of pennies?�
“My admirer?� Diana shot a scornful glance at him. “I call it an intrusion.�
“Did he walk over from that little shop at Cross-Roads?� Mrs. Eaton asked. “I seem to remember a shop there.�