"But you are looking charmingly for all that," Constance went on;--"so charmingly that I feel a morbid sensation creeping all over me while I sit regarding you. Really, when you come to us next winter if you persist in being,--by way of shewing your superiority to ordinary human nature,--a rose without a thorn, the rest of the flowers may all shut up at once. And the rose reddens in my very face, to spite me!"
"Is 'ordinary human nature' typified by a thorn? You give it rather a poor character."
"I never heard of a Thorn that didn't bear an excellent character!" said Constance gravely.
"Hush!" said Fleda laughing;--"I don't want to hear about Mr. Thorn.--Tell me of somebody else."
"I haven't said a word about Mr. Thorn!" said Constance ecstatically, "but since you ask about him I will tell you. He has not acted like himself since you disappeared from our horizon--that is, he has ceased to be at all pointed in his attentions to me; his conversation has lost all the acuteness for which I remember you admired it; he has walked Broadway in a moody state of mind all winter, and grown as dull as is consistent with the essential sharpness of his nature. I ought to except our last interview, though, for his entreaties to mamma that she would bring you home with her were piercing."
Fleda was unable in spite of herself to keep from laughing, but entreated that Constance would tell her of somebody else.
"My respected parents are at Montepoole, with all their offspring,--that is, Florence and Edith,--I am at present anxiously enquired after, being nobody knows where, and to be fetched by mamma this evening. Wasn't I good, little Fleda, to run away from Mr. Carleton to come and spend a whole day in social converse with you?"
"Carleton!" said Fleda.
"Yes--O you don't know who he is! he's a new attraction--there's been nothing like him this great while, and all New York is topsy-turvy about him; the mothers are dying with anxiety and the daughters with admiration; and it's too delightful to see the cool superiority with which he takes it all;--like a new star that all the people are pointing their telescopes at,--as Thorn said spitefully the other day. O he has turned my head; I have looked till I cannot look at anything else. I can just manage to see a rose, but my dazzled powers of vision are equal to nothing more."
"My dear Constance!--"