Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/314

 bereft of all her yesterdays. Let your daughter have had her day—let her have come to an incredible maturity. But you stay here in to-day with me. We won't be fit companions for her, but she shall not lack for company. Uncle Jerry Honeycutt is now ninety-four, and he has a splendid new ear-trumpet—he will be rarely diverting for Miss Lansdale."

But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my friendly advances. It occurred to me now that her self-possession was remarkable. It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too closely. I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for, physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a completed slenderness, I might say—a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme. It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit.

Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that