"That I am not a little insignificance to be passed by with indulgence."
"Should you prefer severity?" and Perior, conscious that she had succeeded in "drawing" him, could not repress "You are an outrageous little egotist, Camelia."
Camelia, her hands clasped over her knee, contemplated him with more gravity than he had expected.
"No," she demurred, "selfish, but not egotistic. There is a difference, isn't there? Egotism is subjective, selfishness objective. I wonder," she added, "what you _do_ think of me. Not that I care--much! Am I not frank? I must care, since I am shuffling about before you; getting a cuffing for my pains!" She rose suddenly, laughing, not in the least bitterly, and walked to the window.
"Mamma and Mary," she announced. "Did Frances evade them? They disconcert her. Frances, you know, goes in for knowingness--cleverness--the modern vice. Don't you hate clever people? Frances doesn't dare talk epigrams to me; I can't stand it. You saw a lot of Mamma and Mary last winter, didn't you? Took Mary out riding. Now, come here, Mr. Perior, and tell me _how_ she looked on horseback."
Camelia was smiling irrepressibly as he joined her, and they watched the approach of the two ladies across the lawn. Certainly the angular, thick-set form of the younger gave no hint of pleasing possibilities under circumstances so trying as the equestrian.
"_I_ never could wheedle Mary into the saddle. I should like to see her on horseback immensely." Camelia's eyes twinkled: "A sort of cowering desperation, wasn't it?"
"No, she rode rather nicely," said Perior concisely. There was something rather brutal in Camelia's comments as she stood there with such rhythmic loveliness of pose and contour.
"I wish Mary did not look so much like a milk pudding," she went on; "a raisinless milk pudding--so sane, so formless, so uneventful."
Lady Paton was a thin, graceful woman, her slenderness emphasized, like her daughter's, by a very small head. Since her husband's death she had worn black, and even now it seemed to invade her delicate whiteness rather overwhelmingly, rising closely about her throat, falling over her fragile hands, enfolding her with a soft solemnity. Her white hair was smoothed thickly under the transparent cambrics of an exquisite cap, and framed the sweetness of a faded face, in profile like Camelia's. Camelia's eyes were her father's, and her smile; Lady Paton's eyes were round like a child's, and her smile half-frightened, half-explanatory. With all the gentlewoman's mild dignity, her look was timid, as though it besought indulgence for a lifelong sense of insignificance, a look that aroused in Perior his grimmest scorn for a world in which such flower-like moral loveliness is inevitably victimized by garish egotisms. He had known Sir Charles, a charming companion, a good fellow--in the somewhat widely licensed sense the term implies, but not fit to untie his wife's shoe-strings when it came to a comparison. Camelia now had stepped upon her father's undeserved pedestal, and Perior, watching the new epoch of incense-burning, had smiled more and more grimly. He was devoted to Lady Paton, and had been so since the days when a raw, sensitive, high-strung youth, fresh from college, her Madonna head had roused in him poetical idealizations, and her husband's gay indifference a chafing resentment. With years he had grown rather fond of Sir Charles, could make allowances for him, and, too, had no longer idealized Lady Paton; but though he now saw her, sweet but dull, lovely in unselfishness, yet weak in all except a submission noble in its own way, the fragrant charm still stirred him with an almost paternal tenderness, a pity, even a reverence. She was too obtuse to see her own cramped and imprisoned life, but he saw it, and her unconsciousness was part of the pathos. He was very fond of her, and she of him, so that with all his protective partisanship there was, too, a willing filial deference.