“You can serve lunch, Elizabeth,” she said, before she greeted her visitors.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Elizabeth, but she did not intend to serve lunch until Jean came; her idea of veracity was as strictly relative as if she had been a Jesuit.
Miss Prenderghast’s dress was very high about the neck and rather short about the ankles. Her nose was her most prominent feature, and she looked as if she felt cold but would have thought it extremely foolish to take any precautions against it.
It is easy to distinguish in the faces of the middle-aged those from whom life has receded from those, in whose existence, it has never played a formidable part. It was to this latter category that Miss Prenderghast belonged. From her earliest years she had been taught to repress all her emotions, and she had repressed them so thoroughly that at times it seemed even to herself as if she no longer had any to suppress. She had put her heart into her sense of duty, a performance which had resulted in developing her conscience at the expense of all her natural instincts. Nobody likes having to deal with a robust conscience and anæmic emotions, the Latin races least of all. The two men, who bowed low, and obediently took the two small cane chairs provided for them, never considered Miss Prenderghast in the light of a human being. She appeared to them as a natural phenomenon of a disagreeable nature, such as a land-slide or a series of bad harvests.
“English ladies can have no temptations,” thought the Curé. “That is why they are Protestants.”
“We shall have trouble with Jean sooner or later,” the doctor said to himself; “he has his father’s blood in him, and he has been brought up by a stone.”
“It was very kind of you both to come,” said Miss Prenderghast coldly; “you must have found the walk from St. Jouin long and dusty.”
“On the contrary,” said the doctor politely, “where the destination is agreeable the path is scattered with flowers.”
“The wild flowers in this part of the country are remarkably scarce,” observed Miss Prenderghast. “I have often regretted it.”
A silence followed. The Curé drew out his handkerchief and spilt some snuff on the floor. The doctor sneezed and Miss Prenderghast frowned. She disliked French habits.