The strain of excessive chaperoning was wearing upon her.
“Your sister looks tired,” a late acquisition of Eulalie’s made observation, compassionately, one evening, seeing Elvira nod over her uncongenial Battenberg-ing by the piano lamp.
“Yes—she’s such an early-to-bed crank,” Eulalie cheerfully replied, “and I suppose it isn’t a lot of fun to sit over there alone doing Battenberg with us chatting just out of good hearing range.”
Hugh Griswold had been blessed with a good, old-fashioned mother, and among the precepts bequeathed her son had been one not so distant of kinship from the Golden Rule:
“Treat everybody well.”
“Suppose we move into good hearing range, then?” he suggested.
“Oh, you can go, if you want to.” Eulalie’s eyebrows curved into brown velvet crescents. “I’m very well satisfied here. Did I tell you Major Yates was going to bring me a pair of guinea pigs to-morrow?”
The next time Hugh Griswold called he brought his uncle, an elderly widower, with a bald, intellectual forehead and large billows of whisker. The uncle beamed upon Eulalie with fatherly benignance, and then established friendly communication with Elvira.
“I thought it might brisk things up a little for Miss Elvira to let him come.” Hugh’s apologetic tone seemed, somehow, the result of Eulalie’s upward-arching eyebrows.
“Oh,” said she—a cool little crescendo.