Dan started at this touch on the quick, but he controlled himself, and said, with dignity, “I have my own plans.”
“Well, you know what mother's are,” returned Eunice easily. “You seem so cheerful that I suppose yours are quite the same, and you're just keeping them for a surprise.” She laughed provokingly, and Dan burst forth again—
“You seem to live to give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you're very much mistaken.”
“Well, well, there! It sha'n't be teased any more, so it sha'n't! It shall have its own way, it shall, and nobody shall say a word against its little girly's mother.” Eunice rose from her chair, and patted Dan on the head as she passed to the adjoining room. He caught her hand, and flung it violently away; she shrieked with delight in his childish resentment, and left him sulking. She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.
“Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don't set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don't know anything about her yet, and you don't, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she's rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she'll be all the better for you: you've got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless; and Mr. Pasmer is a most dignified personage; his eyebrows alone are worth the price of admission.” Dan could not help smiling. “All that there is about it is, you mustn't expect to drive people into raptures about them, and expect them to go grovelling round on their knees because you do.”
“Oh, I know I'm an infernal idiot,” said Dan, yielding to the mingled sarcasm and flattery. “It's because I'm so anxious; and you all seem so confoundedly provisional about it. Eunice, what do you suppose father really thinks?”
Eunice seemed tempted to a relapse into her teasing, but she did not yield. “Oh, father's all right—from your point of view. He's been ridiculous from the first; perhaps that's the reason he doesn't feel obliged to expatiate and expand a great deal at present.”
“Do you think so?” cried Dan, instantly adopting her as an ally.
“Well, if I sad so, oughtn't it to be enough?”
“It depends upon what else you say. Look here, now, Eunice!” Dan said, with a laughing mixture of fun and earnest, “what are you going to say to mother? It's no use, being disagreeable, is it? Of course, I don't contend for ideal perfection anywhere, and I don't expect it. But there isn't anything experimental about this thing, and don't you think we had better all make the best of it?”