His head was bent a little. It gave her the opportunity to notice how thickly and with what a pretty tendency to curl at the ends his hair clothed its crown. Her proposition had not the effect of lifting it.
“I do not quite see how that can be managed,” he answered in a key whose reluctance to disappoint her and an indubitable disapproval of her project strove for mastery.
“We could agree beforehand upon a little code of signals,” she went on, pushing aside the screen that had hitherto partly hidden her in the eagerness of persuasion. “If you passed your hand across your forehead, it would mean ‘Stop at once.’ If you pulled out your shirtcuff, it would mean ‘Make your sentence end in some different way from what you are going to.’”
Still his eyes did not lift themselves, nor did he give any sign of acquiescence. An uncomfortable sense of the horrible glibness—speaking of long use of such methods—with which she developed her little underhand plan was very present to him.
“I am afraid I do not quite like the idea.”
“Don’t you?” she answered humbly and sadly. “Then I am sure it is not a good one, but if you do not consent to help me in some way—to give me some sort of rule to guide me—I shall always be getting into fresh disgrace with Mrs. Tancred; and—old people are so very easily shocked.”
He lifted the head whose well-furnished top she had been admiring now, and looked at her with a disapproval which, if gentle, was very unmistakable.
“I think, if you do not mind, that I had rather you did not speak of my wife quite like that.”
Her heart sank, and the flustered desire to repair her error led her into a far graver one.
“Now I have made an enemy of you too,” she said, “and Heaven knows that is the last thing I wish to do; but—but she looked so much more like your mother.”