“What is so wonderful in my being in my aunt’s opera box?” Stephen demanded. “Cannot a professor of zoology like music, or do you object to a bachelor owning an aunt?”
How pleasant it was to hear his kind voice, with its good-natured raillery! But that was sub-conscious pleasure—her immediate attention was busy with the first part of his speech about his aunt’s opera box; she never supposed he had any relations.
“Who is your aunt?” she asked, abruptly.
“Mrs. Star,” he answered. “Don’t you see the family likeness?”
And oddly enough, in the half light, there was a distinct resemblance in the profile of the bewigged old lady to her handsome young kinsman’s. Deena regretted both the likeness and the relationship; it made her uncomfortable to know that Stephen was the nephew of this worldly-minded old lady, with her fictitious standards and her enormous riches; it seemed to place a barrier between them and to lift him out of the simplicity of his college setting.
“Have I become a snob in this Relentless City’?” she exclaimed. “I find my whole idea of you changed by this announcement. It depresses me! You seem to me a different person here, with these affiliations of fashion and grandeur, than when I thought of you simply as Simeon’s friend.”
“Don’t think of me simply as Simeon’s friend,” he pleaded, half in fun, half in sinful earnest.
“I never shall again,” she said, sadly. “Your greatest charm is eclipsed by this luxury—I want you to belong to Harmouth only.”
Stephen’s lips were twitching with suppressed amusement.
“There is a proverb, my dear lady,” he said, “of the pot and the kettle, that you may recall. I am not sure but what I may find a word to say to you upon the cruelty of disturbing associations.”