Miss Verney, when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal¹ and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the charming haze² of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge from this morning mist as a dry and metallic³ old woman.

If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick’s hospitality, it did not call forth⁴ in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She was lavishly⁵ but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her host’s industry, and as the other guests assembled, straying with vague ejaculations through the labyrinth⁶ of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs. Peyton noted⁷ that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.

To his visitors’ requests to be shown his plans for the competition, Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and dazzled the ladies by allusions⁹ to fenestration and entasis. The party had already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced Darrow’s approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in by mistake, embarrassed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about the

分享到：