“Caroline,” I replied, “I applaud your concern, yet cannot blame Mrs. Gibson. She can see virtue where others see but corpulence. Besides, I consider Miss Gibson rather pretty.”
“I’m sure she’s not pretty,” retorted Caroline, and proceeded to enlighten me on matters interesting and feminine.
Mamma played the only game she knew very skilfully. Her only mistake was in the inapplicability of the means, which was not her fault. Indeed, I feel almost apologetically responsible myself, seeing the line worked so thoroughly, and mused instructively on the devotion of a mother to her child’s prospects.
Miss Gibson was accomplished, and expensively finished. As I had remarked to Carrie, she was decidedly pretty, and would talk Ibsen to you with her face in profile. She displayed an obtrusive girlhood that was not always as modest as its intention, and this pose of maidenhood in bud was apparently the one designed to net me.
Mrs. Gibson gave a musicale, to which I persuaded Carrie with difficulty. She had evidently talked things over with Mrs. Loring, for that lady appeared also, and I was greatly gratified at the concern with which they watched me. I decided to give them all the entertainment they desired. They talked with an obvious intention of interesting me and keeping me apart from Miss Gibson. I was surprised to see so little strategy in a married woman.
Miss Gibson was running a risk of palsying her hand in a vibrant mandolin solo, and producing music suggestive of the dotted line of a wheel-pen. I heard Carrie whisper to Mrs. Loring something about “St. Vitus’s Waltz,” for which I reproved her, considering whose house she was in. I then addressed Mrs. Loring.
“Somehow, Mrs. Loring,” I said, “one thinks more of English maidenhood as one advances in life. There is something in the unsophisticated rosebud——”
Mrs. Loring nodded significantly, implying there was a good deal in the unsophisticated rosebud, but I waited my time; I had a bolt in store for her.
Miss Gibson had finished the solo in a tinsel diminuendo, the intent of which was to enchain the soul a while longer in the regions to which it had been raised. I rose and crossed over to her. She was untangling herself from a mesh of coloured mandolin ribbons that would catch in the ruching of her corsage.
“They’re such a nuisance, Mr. Butterfield; I shall cut them off, I think.”