“Elenore is well, dad. She wanted to come. I think she was a little disappointed that you didn’t want your daughter instead of your son.”
John Carrington shook his head.
“Yellow Dog is no place for a young lady, Ned,” he said. “It was better for her to stay with her friends. I should have liked to see her, though. She’s quite a woman, from her picture. Time for sweethearts, eh? Your Aunt Sarah wrote a good deal about a young Hastings. She seemed to think it might be serious.”
The boy flushed annoyedly.
“Aunt Sarah loves to fuss and exaggerate,” he said, and there was a slight coolness in his voice. “Maiden aunts are apt to, you know,” he went on, more naturally. He smiled his attractive smile once more. Whatever had perturbed him for the instant was past.
Miss Hematite Kipley, ætat seventeen, coming into the room with a fragrant bowl of syringa blossoms, compared it favorably with any picture her beloved romancers had been able to conjure up.
From the moment when she had seen the picturesque figure dismount and make a rapid way into the house, she had been perishing to make this entrance, but she had restrained herself in accordance with her ideas of propriety and gentility. Miss Kipley strove to be “elegant,” aided by certain open columns in respected periodicals, after which she patterned her conduct and her clothes.
The meeting between father and son she characterized as “a sacred moment,” and she regretted her mother’s continued intrusion upon it with the resigned exasperation of one who had often and fruitlessly pointed out to a primitive parent the proper forms of procedure.
Miss Kipley was rather pretty in a wholesome, buxom, blond way, and the “open columns” had stimulated her to a crisp freshness of attire, and partially reconciled her to the maternal regulations of its enforced simplicity.
She came into the room with her eyelids so demurely lowered that she might have been taken for a sleepwalker.