"I--Oh say now, any of 'em will tell you I've never read a word of him in my life. Never could find the hitch--er--don't you know, between the words and the sense. Quit it, will you, Culpepper, kicking me?"
"'A thing of beauty is a joy forever!'" gayly chanted dependable little Juliette who true to the program was to throw herself and her munitions into breaches as needed.
"'Handsome is as handsome does,'" suddenly observed Bliss, very young and passing bitter, with an obviousness patent to those who understood the evening's coolness between him and Amanthus, "'Beauty is only skin deep.'" Could it be that Bliss had noted the glances of two of the company, Mr. Wingham and Mr. Tate, fixed upon Amanthus even now?
"And yet," it was the first spontaneous contribution to the evening from the Reverend Mr. Wingham, his gaze returning from that retired corner where it had been drawn again and again, "the eternal youth of the beautiful!" Certainly Amanthus did not need vocabulary or repartee in the least!
Adele with new courage, and this time at a signal from Maud, began again: "The Puritan through his great exponent----"
The doorbell rang. Kind conventions! _Comme il faut!_ Had Selina really been congratulating herself in these gratifying terms?
It was Cousin Marcus Bruce; she recognized his voice as Papa let him in.
At least the guests were continuing to talk, though in the interruption from the doorbell and the answering of it by Papa, Adele evidently had lost out. For as the divided attention of Selina came back to the circle about her, Miss Boswell for whom all these endeavors and proprieties had been evoked, was doing her best to defend the utilitarian beauty of woolen gloves and ear-muffs, propounded upon her original proposition by spectacled Mr. Welling, backed by Mr. Cannon of the white vest.
The while Selina heard Papa urging Marcus to give up his umbrella and to take off his cape which she knew to be a waterproof cloth voluminous affair to which he was much addicted. It gave one a sense of storm and stress of weather and downpour without, whereas in reality it was a dry and mild starlit night. It was merely of a piece with Marcus.
And here he came strolling in, casual as always. Marcus was tall, lithe and thin. One lock of black hair fell anywhere, according to the moment, over onto his long, thin-flanked face, to be brushed aside continually by his long fingers, out of his deliberately roaming and observing blue eyes, the remaining black locks throwing themselves anyhow backward onto his old velvet coat collar. You never knew what a Bruce might do, but you could be sure he would do something extraordinary. Papa's overtures in the hall had only partly prevailed, for Marcus coming strolling in, had retained his strapped and buckled Arctic overshoes.