Passing of the Third Floor Back | Page 6

her fan the vacant seat beside her. "Tell me about yourself. You interest me." Miss Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all youthful-looking members of the opposite sex. It harmonised with the peach complexion and the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.
"I am glad of that," answered the stranger, taking the chair suggested. "I so wish to interest you."
"You're a very bold boy." Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose of glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time encountered the eyes of the stranger looking into hers. And then it was that Miss Kite experienced precisely the same curious sensation that an hour or so ago had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger had first bowed to her. It seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer the Miss Kite that, had she risen and looked into it, the fly-blown mirror over the marble mantelpiece would, she knew, have presented to her view; but quite another Miss Kite--a cheerful, bright-eyed lady verging on middle age, yet still good-looking in spite of her faded complexion and somewhat thin brown locks. Miss Kite felt a pang of jealousy shoot through her; this middle-aged Miss Kite seemed, on the whole, a more attractive lady. There was a wholesomeness, a broadmindedness about her that instinctively drew one towards her. Not hampered, as Miss Kite herself was, by the necessity of appearing to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, this other Miss Kite could talk sensibly, even brilliantly: one felt it. A thoroughly "nice" woman this other Miss Kite; the real Miss Kite, though envious, was bound to admit it. Miss Kite wished to goodness she had never seen the woman. The glimpse of her had rendered Miss Kite dissatisfied with herself.
"I am not a boy," explained the stranger; "and I had no intention of being bold."
"I know," replied Miss Kite. "It was a silly remark. Whatever induced me to make it, I can't think. Getting foolish in my old age, I suppose."
The stranger laughed. "Surely you are not old."
"I'm thirty-nine," snapped out Miss Kite. "You don't call it young?"
"I think it a beautiful age," insisted the stranger; "young enough not to have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy."
"Oh, I daresay," returned Miss Kite, "any age you'd think beautiful. I'm going to bed." Miss Kite rose. The paper fan had somehow got itself broken. She threw the fragments into the fire.
"It is early yet," pleaded the stranger, "I was looking forward to a talk with you."
"Well, you'll be able to look forward to it," retorted Miss Kite. "Good-night."
The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in the glass, in her own room with the door shut. The vision of that other Miss Kite--the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown hair had been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary forgetfulness might not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner that evening.
The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table, seeking something to read.
"You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite," remarked the lady who was cousin to a baronet.
"It seems so," admitted the stranger.
"My cousin, Sir William Bosster," observed the crocheting lady, "who married old Lord Egham's niece--you never met the Eghams?"
"Hitherto," replied the stranger, "I have not had that pleasure."
"A charming family. Cannot understand--my cousin Sir William, I mean, cannot understand my remaining here. 'My dear Emily'--he says the same thing every time he sees me: 'My dear Emily, how can you exist among the sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.' But they amuse me."
A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
"Our family on my mother's side," continued Sir William's cousin in her placid monotone, "was connected with the Tatton-Joneses, who when King George the Fourth--" Sir William's cousin, needing another reel of cotton, glanced up, and met the stranger's gaze.
"I'm sure I don't know why I'm telling you all this," said Sir William's cousin in an irritable tone. "It can't possibly interest you."
"Everything connected with you interests me," gravely the stranger assured her.
"It is very kind of you to say so," sighed Sir William's cousin, but without conviction; "I am afraid sometimes I bore people."
The polite stranger refrained from contradiction.
"You see," continued the poor lady, "I really am of good family."
"Dear lady," said the stranger, "your gentle face, your gentle voice, your gentle bearing, all proclaim it."
She looked without flinching into the stranger's eyes, and gradually a smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
"How foolish of me." She spoke rather to herself than to the stranger. "Why, of course, people--people whose opinion is worth troubling about--judge of you by what you are, not by what you go about saying