Lady Renshaw threw a quick, suspicious glance at her. ‘What a very strange person!’ she murmured. The vicar’s sister was a puzzle to her. It could not be that she was covertly making fun of her, Lady Renshaw! No; the idea was too preposterous.
Dr Mac had not gone about for fifty years with his eyes shut. He had discovered that many persons, both male and female, who plume themselves on their knowledge of the world and their shrewdness in dealing with the common affairs of life, are yet as susceptible to flattery, even of the most fulsome kind, and just as liable to be led away by it into the regions of foolishness, as their far less sophisticated fellow-mortals. What if this woman, with all her worldly-mindedness and calculating selfishness, were one of those individuals who may be dexterously led by the nose and persuaded to dance to any tune so long as their ears are judiciously tickled? A peculiar gleam came into the doctor’s eyes as these thoughts passed through his mind. He cleared his voice and turned to her ladyship.
‘It appears to me, Lady Renshaw,’ he began, ‘speaking from a professional point of view, that you are gifted with one of those highly-strung, super-sensitive, and poetical organisations which render those who possess them peculiarly susceptible to all beautiful influences whether of nature or of art. Hem.’
‘How thoroughly you understand me, Dr M‘Murdo!’ responded her ladyship, beaming on him with one of her broadest smiles.
The vicar took off his spectacles and proceeded to rub them vigorously with his handkerchief. ‘Mac, you are nothing better than a barefaced humbug,’ he whispered to himself.
‘It would seem only natural, my dear madam,’ resumed the unblushing doctor, ‘that a temperament such as yours, which throbs responsive to beauty in all its thousand varied forms as readily as an Æolian harp responds to the faintest sigh of the summer breeze, should—should find an outlet for itself in one form or other. Have you never, may I ask, attempted to pour out your thick crowding fancies in verse? Have you never, while gazing on some such scene as this, felt as if you could float away on—on the wings of Poesy? Have you never, in brief, felt as if you could only find relief by rushing into song? Hem.’
The poor vicar fairly gasped for breath.
‘Yes, yes; that is exactly how I have felt a thousand times,’ gushed her ladyship. ‘At such moments I seem to exhale poetry.’
‘Dear me! rather a remarkable phenomenon,’ murmured Miss Pen.
‘I long to be a dryad—or a nymph—or one of Dian’s huntresses in some Arcadian grove of old.’