She held the curtains apart.
"You are Mr. Ames. My aunt expected you. I regret to say that she is not in the house just now, but she will doubtless return for tea. I am her niece. Won't you sit down?"
As she found a seat for herself, I made bold to survey her with some particularity. She carried her fine height with beautiful dignity. She was a creature of grace, and it was a grace of strength, the suppleness and ease that mark our later outdoor American woman. She could do her miles over these hills,—I was sure of that. Her fine olive face, crowned with dark hair, verified the impression I had gathered from Jewett, that she was a woman of cultivation. She had read the poets; Dante and Petrarch spoke from her eyes. Cecilia was no bad name for her; she suggested heavenly harmonies! And as for Jewett's story of Wiggins's infatuation, I was content: if this was the face that had shattered the frowning towers of Wiggins's Ilium and sent him to brood disconsolate upon his broad acres in Dakota, my heart went out to him, for his armor had been pierced by arrows worthy of its metal.
She was talking, meanwhile, of the day and its buoyant air and of the tapestries hung in the woodlands, in a voice deep with rare intimations of viol chords.
"It's very quiet here. It doesn't seem possible that we are so near the city. My aunt chose the place with care, and she made no mistake about it. Yes; the house was built by Mr. Pepperton, but not for us. My aunt bought it of the estate of the gentleman who built it. This will be her first winter here."
She made no reference to the object of my visit, and I wondered if she knew just how I came there. A man-servant wheeled in a portable tea-table and placed it beside a particular chair, lighted the lamp under the kettle, and silently departed. And with the stage thus disposed Miss Hollister herself appeared. She greeted me without surprise and much as she might have spoken to any guest in her house. I had sometimes been treated as though I were the agent of a decorator's shop, or a delinquent plumber, by the people whom I served; but Miss Hollister and her niece established me upon a plane that was wholly social. I was made to feel that it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be there, having tea, with no business ahead of me but to be agreeable. The fact that I had come to correct the distemper of their flues was utterly negligible. I remembered with satisfaction that I had journeyed from town in a new business suit that made the best of my attenuated figure, and I will not deny that I felt at ease.
Miss Hollister talked briskly as she made the tea.
"I was over at the kennels when you came. I believe the kennel-master is a rascal, Cecilia. I have no opinion of him whatever."