“I mean were you ever in love like that, Aunt Etarre—were you?” Lisa put it wistfully.
“Ah, well now, yes indeed,” I answered; “do you think that my hair was always straight on rainy days, as it is now?”
Lisa sighed again, even more dolorously, and shook her head.
“It couldn’t have been the same,” she murmured decidedly.
Poor, dear Twenty, who never will believe that Seventy could have been “the same.” But I forgot to sigh for this, so concerned I was at this breaking of Lisa’s reticence, that enviable flowery armour of young womanhood. So I waited, folding and refolding my Mechlin, until I had won her confidence.
He was, it developed, a blessed young lawyer, with very long lashes and a high sense of honour inextricably confused with lofty ideals and ambitions and a most beautiful manner. He was, in fact, young Eric Chartres, grandnephew to my dear Madame Sally Chartres. The sole cloud was the objection of Dudley Manners, Lisa’s guardian, to the friendship of the two on the hackneyed ground of their youth; for Eric, I absently reckoned it aloud, was one year and five months older than Lisa.
“But it isn’t as if he hadn’t seen the world,” Lisa said magnificently. “He has been graduated from college a year, and he has been abroad twice—once when he was nine, and then for two months last Summer. And he has read everything—O Aunt Etarre,” said Lisa, “and then think of his loving me.”
“When am I going to meet him?” I asked, having exchanged with him only a word in a crowded room or two. As I expected Lisa flung herself down at my knee and laid her hands over the old Mechlin.
“O would you—would you? Uncle Dudley said he would trust me wholly to you and Uncle Pelleas. Might he call—might he come this afternoon?”
“The telephone,” said I, “is on the landing.”