Eleanor | Page 7

knows all your Boston cousins, if not you. Edward, will you take Miss Foster?--she's the stranger.'
Mrs. Burgoyne pressed the girl's hand with a friendly effusion. Beyond her was a dark-haired man, who bowed in silence. Lucy Foster took his arm, and he led her through a large intervening room, in which were many tables and many books, to the dining-room.
On the way he muttered a few embarrassed words as to the weather and the lateness of dinner, walking meanwhile so fast that she had to hurry after him. 'Good heavens, why she is a perfect chess-board!' he thought to himself, looking askance at her dress, in a sudden and passionate dislike--'one could play draughts upon her. What has my Aunt been about?'
The girl looked round her in bewilderment as they sat down. What a strange place! The salon in her momentary glance round it had seemed to her all splendour. She had been dimly aware of pictures, fine hangings, luxurious carpets. Here on the other hand all was rude and bare. The stained walls were covered with a series of tattered daubs, that seemed to be meant for family portraits--of the Malestrini family perhaps, to whom the villa belonged? And between the portraits there were rough modern doors everywhere of the commonest wood and manufacture which let in all the draughts, and made the room not a room, but a passage. The uneven brick floor was covered in the centre with some thin and torn matting; many of the chairs ranged against the wall were broken; and the old lamp that swung above the table gave hardly any light.
Miss Manisty watched her guest's face with a look of amusement.
'Well, what do you think of our dining-room, my dear? I wanted to clean it and put it in order. But my nephew there wouldn't have a thing touched.'
She looked at Manisty, with a movement of the lips and head that seemed to implore him to make some efforts.
Manisty frowned a little, lifted his great brow and looked, not at Miss Foster, but at Mrs. Burgoyne--
'The room, as it happens, gives me more pleasure than any other in the villa.'
Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.
'Because it's hideous?'
'If you like. I should only call it the natural, untouched thing.'
Then while his Aunt and Mrs. Burgoyne made mock of him, he fell silent again, nervously crumbling his bread with a large wasteful hand. Lucy Foster stole a look at him, at the strong curls of black hair piled above the brow, the moody embarrassment of the eyes, the energy of the lips and chin.
Then she turned to her companions. Suddenly the girl's clear brown skin flushed rosily, and she abruptly took her eyes from Mrs. Burgoyne.
Miss Manisty, however--in despair of her nephew--was bent upon doing her own duty. She asked all the proper questions about the girl's journey, about the cousins at Florence, about her last letters from home. Miss Foster answered quickly, a little breathlessly, as though each question were an ordeal that had to be got through. And once or twice, in the course of the conversation, she looked again at Mrs. Burgoyne, more lingeringly each time. That lady wore a thin dress gleaming with jet. The long white arms showed under the transparent stuff. The slender neck and delicate bosom were bare,--too bare surely,--that was the trouble. To look at her filled the girl's shrinking Puritan sense with discomfort. But what small and graceful hands!--and how she used them!--how she turned her neck!--how delicious her voice was! It made the new-comer think of some sweet plashing stream in her own Vermont valleys. And then, every now and again, how subtle and startling was the change of look!--the gaiety passing in a moment, with the drooping of eye and mouth, into something sad and harsh, like a cloud dropping round a goddess. In her elegance and self-possession indeed, she seemed to the girl a kind of goddess--heathenishly divine, because of that mixture of unseemliness, but still divine.
Several times Mrs. Burgoyne addressed her--with a gentle courtesy--and Miss Foster answered. She was shy, but not at all awkward or conscious. Her manner had the essential self-possession which is the birthright of the American woman. But it suggested reserve, and a curious absence of any young desire to make an effect.
As for Mrs. Burgoyne, long before dinner was over, she had divined a great many things about the new-comer, and amongst them the girl's disapproval of herself. 'After all'--she thought--'if she only knew it, she is a beauty. What a trouble it must have been first to find, and then to make that dress!--Ill luck!--And her hair! Who on earth taught her to drag it back like that? If one could only loosen it, how beautiful it would be! What is it? Is it Puritanism? Has she been