ing threw off almost sharply. "Give me someone as well worth
acclaiming and I'll shout with the best! But you scarcely quote your
father as among the average, do you?--The people whom you'll meet on
Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains
yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as
indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their
aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop
definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder
than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye
on the Church, the other on the world. The permanent inconsistency of her
attitude, as I may say her permanent squint, gives her a certain _cachet_
without which she'd be a positive blank.--She is most anxious to meet
you, by the way, and Sir Charles--always supposing he is self-sacrificing
enough to come--because she knows connections of his and yours at
Harchester, a genial pillar of the Church in the form of an Archdeacon,
in whom, as I gather, her dear dead Lord Bishop very much put his trust."

"Tom Verity's father, I suppose," Damaris murmured, her colour rising,
the hint of a cloud too upon her brow.

"And who may Tom Verity be?" Mrs. Frayling, noting both colour and cloud,
alertly asked.

"A distant cousin. He stayed with us in the autumn just before he went
out to India. He passed into the Indian Civil Service from Oxford at the
top of the list."

"Praiseworthy young man."

"Oh! but you would like him, Henrietta," the girl declared. "He is very
clever and very entertaining too when"--

"When?"

"Well, when he doesn't tease too much. He has an immense amount to talk
about, and very good manners."

"Also, when he does not tease too much?--And you like him?"

"I don't quite know," Damaris slowly said. "He did not stay with us
long enough for me to make up my mind. And then other things happened
which rather put him out of my head. He was a little conceited, perhaps,
I thought."

"Not unnaturally, being at the top of the pass list. But though other
things put him out of your head, he writes to you?"

In the pussy-warmth within her muff, Mrs. Frayling became sensible
that Damaris' hand grew unresponsive, at once curiously stiff and
curiously limp.

"He has written twice. Once on the voyage out, and again soon after he
arrived. The--the second letter reached me this week."

Notwith