“It is not hung quite straight,” she said in her pleasant, commonplace voice. “There, that’s better! Is there anything more you want, Horace?”
Her brother’s answer was made from his teacup; it sounded very like “Damn!”
Horace continued to be extremely nervous. He had meant to go and see Edith after dinner; she and her aunt, Lady Walton, had returned to town with him, but he couldn’t go to Edith, having arranged nothing whatever, and not even having mentioned that he intended to keep his boy.
All through dinner Etta held the conversation and guided it as she chose. Mr. Flinders, the tutor, responded admirably.
Miss Lestrange had a perfect tone with the tutor; she treated him with that deference which marks the difference in social value. Her delicate flattery was a restraint; it put him at once on the footing of an inferior position where she could afford to be delightful to him without his ever meeting her on her own level. It was too fine for condescension, too gracious for patronage; it was an “invulnerable nothing”; and yet you could no more have passed it than have walked through bayonets; and there was this added attraction, that the bayonets were garlanded with flowers.
“It was such a pity Leslie behaved so badly this afternoon,” Miss Lestrange began. “Mr. Flinders felt that such direct disobedience must be punished, especially when it led to such a decided risk as the boy’s playing with whooping-cough children in the Park. So instead of being allowed to come and see you, Horace, he had to be packed off, supperless, to bed; but you will go up after dinner, I suppose?”
“I should have gone up before,” interrupted Horace, “but they said--”
“Yes, I think authority must be upheld,” said his sister. “You see, dear Horace, Mr. Flinders had already warned Leslie about the punishment.”
She looked across at her brother, as if to say that the punishment was an absurd blunder of Mr. Flinders, which they must overlook, because although he was a very clever fellow, of course, and a clergyman’s son, and really quite a gentleman, still--
Horace understood the look, and dropped the subject. He was a man who took almost everything very easily; but not quite everything.