"She is prettier than ever—improved, I should say, all through," was his answer.
Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things."
"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."
"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself shows such good taste and nice feeling."
"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.
"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he does not wish to say.
"She is better than pretty—she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine affectionately—Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends and knots untied than had her friend's.