“You don’t say so. I beg your pardon,” exclaimed Mr. Baxter, though why he did so Marion could not quite understand. Upon my soul.” (“Ah, Sophia, I shall have a little crow to pluck with you.”) “Very strange,” audibly again. “Very strange I never heard it. A great loss to his country, a very great loss, was Mr. Vere. Your father! Well, to be sure. Ah, indeed.” And with a series of such little detached, fragmentary observations the worthy gentleman composed his somewhat startled nerves.
The rest of dinner passed uneventfully enough.
Marion got on decidedly better with the gentleman than she had done with the lady. And Mr. Baxter, on his part, mentally pronounced her a most charming woman.
Geoffrey’s neighbour at table was the Maria Jane, so cuttingly described by her aunt as “trollopy.” She was tall certainly, for her age, rather alarmingly so, with the possibility in prospect of continuing to grow some four or five years to come. And thin, very thin, “lanky,” to use another of Mrs. Baxter’s favourite expressions. But at her age thinness, lankiness even, if the word be preferred, has, when coupled with gentleness and perfect absence of affectation, to my mind a certain touching, appealing sweetness of its own. But this, of course, is a matter of opinion. It may be very bad taste, but I have rather a horror off fat young girls.
Maria Jane Baxter was, however, really and truly a very sweet girl. Geoffrey’s heart she very speedily won, for before they had been ten minutes at table, she asked him timidly if he could tell her the name of “the lovely young lady on her uncle’s right.”
So he and she, as might have been expected from this auspicious commencement, very speedily made friends; and when the ladies retired after dinner to the drawing-room, Maria Jane took care to establish herself in a modest corner not far from Mr. Baldwin’s attractive wife.
The conversation of the elder ladies was to Marion so utterly uninteresting, to say the least, that it was with a feeling of immense relief that she heard herself accosted by name by a gentle voice, asking if she would like to examine a collection of really beautiful engravings in a portfolio on the table. Mrs. Baldwin responded cordially to the young girl’s modest attention.
Over the engravings they fell into conversation.
“Do you draw, Miss Baxter?” Marion happened to ask.
“A little,” replied the girl. “That is, I am very fond of it, and my master thinks I have taste for it. But lately I have had to give it up, as at the school where I am now they were afraid of its making me stoop.”