Camelia was not demonstrative, Lady Paton had sighed over the accepted fact, but she could trace all such natural emotions on Sir Arthur's face when he watched or spoke to her daughter. She already felt a maternal tenderness for him, and his exquisite courtesy, that already implied rights, was nothing less than filial.
Lady Henge's dignified intellectuality she found indeed rather awesome, but she hoped by careful listening to expand her powers of comprehension, and Lady Henge delivered her expositions of social ethics with a pleasant faith in their tonic effect upon the suppressed mind of her hostess--
"Suppressed, repressed, Arthur, not shallow," she said to her son, "and you could not ask a daintier, truer gentlewoman for your wife's mother, dear." Lady Henge sighed just a little--though quite resigned to the future--for the Duchess of Amshire's mind was neither suppressed nor shallow, but as expansive and capable an organ as her own, and infinitely sympathetic. Lady Elizabeth, too!--Lady Elizabeth, who had worked at shirt-making in the slums for two weeks, and had caught typhoid fever at it--even Camelia's sunny charm could not efface the thought of Lady Elizabeth's almost providential fitness. But in spite of inevitable regrets Lady Henge was resigned, and the two mothers got on together very pleasantly, since moulding capability can hardly carp at a gentle, clay-like receptivity.
Mr. Rodrigg seemed the only new guest intended for any permanence of stay. He duly arrived at the given date and hour, a punctual man, very much aware of his own importance, and of the importance to him, and to others, of every moment.
And Mr. Rodrigg was really a very important personage and his moments weighty with significance. And this iron-gray, middle-aged man had not at all foolishly fallen in love with the brilliant Miss Paton. A wife so beautiful, so capable, so charming, would be the finishing touch to his influence; matter-of-fact motives may well have underlain Mr. Rodrigg's amorous determination, which Camelia thought so effectually snuffed out. But indeed Mr. Rodrigg's determination was far too strong to credit hers. His self-confidence smiled kindly upon a pretty coquetry. The exquisite grace of Camelia's rebuff--she had almost thought it worthy of publicity, so felicitous had been its delicate sweep round a corner dangerous to friendship--had merely impressed Mr. Rodrigg's unappreciative bluntness with a reassuring conviction of trifling and postponement.