Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/228

 Professor would have considered a feminine change of heart, she began to encourage the black shawl to fall about her with grace and held it poetically to her breast with a long white hand. When he turned away his head to point out to her a herd of fog-wrapped ponies feeding close to the circle, she quickly seized the opportunity to sleek down her black hair over her ears with her characteristic gesture. She wished she knew whether or not her color had risen with the cool damp of the walk. Without color she never had a high opinion of her appearance. As Ripley turned his eyes to the lady beside him, he indirectly answered her thought.

'The fog, these old grey stones—this vast moor that we cannot see—only feel—certainly becomes you, Miss Bardeen. I can fancy myself pixie-led, you the pixie, and this the rendezvous of your kind.'

She rewarded this sop to her egoism with a sidewise goblin glance.

'Oh,' he said enthusiastically, 'look at me again like that. I could see then just the little girl you were at ten or eleven. Weren't you mischievous and secretive, and, pardon me, quite a provoking child? You see, I have children of my own.'

'If I was, no one bothered to slap me much. Papa was too interested in his classics, and Mamma—well, she never grew up enough to take a really adult interest in a child. She shook me if I got in her way, and how my long ringlets and my long legs all dangled—just like a little wooden doll!'

The man loved children and Lanice's picture