Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/186

 'No more have you, I take it!' I exclaimed. She evidently meant more than she said, and this impression chilled me, made me really uncomfortable.

'No, but I know my own daughter. She's a very rare young woman.'

'You have a singular tone about her', I responded—'such a tone as I think I have never heard on a mother's lips. I have observed it before, but never so accentuated.'

At this Mrs. Pallant got up; she stood there an instant, looking down at me. 'You make my reparation—my expiation—difficult!' And leaving me rather startled, she began to move along the terrace.

I overtook her presently and repeated her words. 'Your reparation—your expiation? What on earth do you mean by that?'

'You know perfectly what I mean—it is too magnanimous of you to pretend you don't.'

'Well, at any rate I don't see what good it does me or what it makes up to me for that you should abuse your daughter.'

'Oh, I don't care; I shall save him!' she exclaimed, as we went, with a kind of perverse cheerfulness. At the same moment two ladies, apparently English, came toward us (scattered groups had been sitting there and the inmates of the hotel were moving to and fro), and I observed the immediate charming transition (it seemed to me to show such years of social practice), by which, as they greeted us, she exchanged her excited, almost fevered expression for an air of recognition and pleasure. They stopped to speak to her and she