"Ah! Kate," he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large, white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.
"You and Felicia are coming to me for a week," she said, again flicking her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. "I mustn't let you get rusty up here."
If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had an equal faculty for "drawing" her father. His eye did not turn from the landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, "Ah, my dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my good little whetstone here I don't fancy that the combined efforts of our not highly intelligent country people could save me from it--when I go among them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in spite of one's resolve to keep one's steel bright. Up here we have our own little space of dry, bracing air--we keep one another sharpened, don't we, Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find, when we come down from our tiny Parnassus."
Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm around his daughter's shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness of the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight smile seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while disavowing its magnificent complacency.
Mrs. Merrick's sudden flush made evident her nose's amelioration. "It is well to have the gift of idealization, Austin--it makes life far more comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?" The irony of her tone was not easy.
"One moment, Kate." Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter's shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. "Do you see that quite delightful effect--that group of trees melting against the sky--" It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom Mrs. Merrick had never heard. "He could do it; it's like one of his smiling bits." His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, "I am rather busy just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing--German idealism; what caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, the unpleasant sun;--I can't leave just now."