Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/82

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RS. stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on the ﬂow of her friend’s reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs. Amherst’s delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and grace—looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to go, saying, as her hand met Amherst’s, “Tonight, then, you must tell me all about those poor Dillons,” he had the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from their next meeting.

“Say, John—the boss is a looker,” Duplain commented across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof from such contacts to resent them.

He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer’s next observation. “There was another lady at the ofﬁce this morning,” Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch. “Asking after you—tried to get me to show her over the mills when I said you were busy.”

“Asking after me? What did she look like?” [ 70 ]