Regular hours being among the requirements of the head of the Tramlay household, Lucia appeared at the breakfast-table, the morning after the reception, as the clock struck eight. Her father, dressed for business, and her mother, in négligée attire and expression, were discussing the unbidden guest of the evening before.
“But he was so country,—so dreadful common,” protested Mrs. Tramlay,
neo skin lab 好唔好 with her customary helpless air.
But if he bought evening
“Nonsense!” said her husband. “There was
Pretty renew 呃人 nothing country or common about his face and manners. There hasn’t been so bright-eyed, manly-looking a fellow in our house before since I don’t know when. Eh, Lucia?”
I said nothing but what was true. I merely said he was one of the finest young men I had ever known,—that he was of the highest character, and very intelligent besides.”
“Such qualities don’t make a man fit for society,” said the lady of the house.
“No, I suppose not; if they did we’d see more of them at our receptions and parties.”
When Philip Hayn left the family mansion, a little after midnight, he had but two distinct ideas: one was that he had better find his way back to Sol Mantring’s sloop to sleep, and the other was that he didn’t believe he could fall asleep again in less than a{47} week. All that he had seen, the people not excepted, was utterly unlike Haynton.
The conversation, also, was new, although he could not remember much of it; and the ladies—well, he always had admired whatever was admirable in the young women in the village, but there certainly were no such handsome and brilliant girls at Haynton as some he had met that night. He could not explain to himself the difference, except that, compared with Lucia’s friends, his old acquaintances appeared—well, rather unfinished and ignorant. And as far as these new acquaintances appeared above his older ones, so far did Lucia appear above her friends. He had studied her face scores of times before, and told himself where it was faulty; now he mentally withdrew every criticism he had ever made, and declared her perfection itself.
Would he ever forget how she looked as she offered to help him from that easy-chair in the library? He wished his mother might have seen her at that instant; then he was glad she did not. He remembered that his mother did not entirely approve of some of Lucia’s bathing-dresses; what would the good woman think of fashionable evening attire? And yet perhaps it was not as dreadful as it seemed: evidently Lucia’s mother approved of it, and was not she a member of a church,—not, he regretted, of the faith in which all Haynton worshipped, yet still a church? And did not many of Lucia’s guests dress in similar style?