She walked back from the window and stood before me, dignified in her heterogeneous attire and perfectly serious.
“I thought you knew better than that, Rollo,” she said. “I don’t think there would be any scene, and, anyway, I’m not in my first season, you know.” She smiled the same queer smile. “But if you think that I should be interested in such a matter merely as an—experiment in mood—you wrong me, Rollo; and if, on the other hand, I am to take it in the plainer sense, I should like something less warmed up and out of date. You can hardly call it fervid, can you?”
I admired Millicent in that moment. I rose and took her hand.
“Millicent,” I said, “I accept your rebuke. There is nothing further to be said—just now; but soon——”
She laughed her accustomed laugh, the same old Millicent again.
“I shall be perfectly willing to consider any representations you may have to make on the subject, Rollo, provided they are forwarded in the ordinary course. Will you ring for tea?”
XI
QUEEN OF LOVE AND BEAUTY
From what I was able to gather, the course of young Ted Carmichael’s love was highly meritorious in its constancy. His affection was a solid, reliable fact, and, to me, correspondingly uninteresting. His father, I remembered, had, years before, wooed little Alice Chatterton on much the same lines, between which two it had been what their friends called an “understood thing,” since the first bashful glances of adolescence. In both cases this trait was regarded as a highly commendable faithfulness, and invested with the usual attributes of true and undying love; but to me it had less of this positive quality than appeared, and argued rather a certain paucity of invention in the finer relations of amorous adventure. It was admirable, but the case was settled from the beginning, and offered little field for speculation, even its incidental tiffs and mischances being in their rise and end perfectly accountable. In the case of the son, his three terms at Eton, coming when they did, might have resulted in a break from this monotonous routine of laudable love; his father had been hopeless from the start.
But Miss Nellie Bassishaw bade fair for freer flights. During the occasional intervals of my seeing her she seemed to grow in sections and to develop in seasons, and now, emancipated from the last suggestion of governess, was gowned and coifed beyond the limit of girlhood. True, her neck still showed a whitish celery colour from the unhabitual exposure, and in the management of her feet and skirt the last trace of the tomboy was disappearing; but she displayed beneath an eminently suitable hat glances that promised in the near future a hundred roguishnesses and mischiefs. If anything could shake Ted’s devotion, Miss Nellie, I decided, had it.
Young Ted called on me one afternoon for no reason at all that I could discover during the first half-hour of his visit. He was clad point-devise, bore his gloves and cane with admirable instinct, and looked as fresh and trim a youth as ever received the half-motherly kiss of a widow. I greeted him with pleasure.