"I do like your relations," she once told Harry; "I like your country and your university and your friends well enough, but I like your people even better. I like your Uncle James, though I'm scared to death of him, and Aunt Cecilia of course is a dear; but I like Aunt Selina best. I never saw such a person! I didn't know you had her type in America. She makes Aunt Miriam look like a vulgar, blatant little upstart!"
"I know," said Harry, laughing. "Did you tell Aunt Miriam that?"
"Something to that effect, yes. She laughed, and said that she had always felt that way in her presence, too.—There's more about Aunt Selina than that, though; there's something wonderfully human about her, at bottom. I have an idea she could get nearer to me, if she wanted to, than almost any one else, just because her true self is so rare and remote."
Both Harry and James saw a good deal of Beatrice during her visit. Harry was supposed to be in training again, and it was his interesting custom to dine discreetly at the training table at six o'clock and then dash out to his aunt's and eat another and much more sumptuous meal at seven. James was scandalized when he heard of this proceeding, but he carefully refrained from saying anything to Harry about it; he merely smiled non-committally when Harry, with a desire of drawing him out, rather flauntingly referred to it.
"A few weeks ago he would have cursed me out," he thought; "lectured me up and down about it. Now he won't say anything because he's afraid it would bring on another scrap." The thought made him feel lonely and miserable.
James was greatly taken with Beatrice; that was quite clear from the first. He was attracted by her beauty, and still more by her apparent indifference to it. He found her more frank and sensible than American girls, whose débutante conventionalities and mannerisms bored and irritated him. He could not conceive of Beatrice "guying" or "kidding him along" on slight acquaintance, as most of his American friends did, or of Beatrice openly dazzling him with her beauty, or using her prerogative of sex by making him "stand around" before other people.
One evening after dinner Beatrice, accompanied by both the brothers, was walking down one drive and up the other, as the family were in the habit of doing on warm spring evenings.
"Are you both prepared to hear something funny?" she asked.
"Fire away," they answered, and she continued:
"Well, I'm probably going to come back here next winter and live with Aunt Selina!"