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This is my eldest daughter, Isabel; and this soft-eyed, pale-cheeked damozel too loyal for a leaf of the red rose is the Lady Anne." The two girls had started from their father's arms at the first address to Marmaduke, and their countenances had relapsed from their caressing and childlike expression into all the stately demureness with which they had been brought up to regard a stranger.
So when these gentlemen asked to see an aeroplane, I took them into a lean-to where I store my least desirable things, and there pointed out a mass of wings and bits of tangled wire, saying as dramatically as I could: 'There she is! And they first stared, then laughed; and when one complained: 'That's a ruin, not an aeroplane, I answered with all the demureness possible; 'and what is any aeroplane but a ruin in prospect?
The young man could not follow her glance, nor was he anything curious. Young as he was, he could enjoy a fine picture. There was a pretty demureness in the girl's manner, a warm piquancy in the turn of the neck, and a delicacy in her gestures, which to him, fresh from hard hours in the woods, was part of some delightful Arcady though Arcady was more in his veins than of his knowledge.
Best was quite enough to occupy her. There was only three years difference in their ages, but this seemed to have made a great interval between one whose metier had been to be youthful and active, and her who had to be staid and dignified. The early dinner passed in all demureness and formality, and the poor visitor was too much tired for any more services to be thought of for her.
Why, pardon me, it is strange, but you don't seem to care much for women?" "Oh, yes, I do," said Percival, with a sly demureness. "I am very fond of my mother!" "Very proper and filial," said Varney, laughing; "and does your love for the sex stop there?" "Well, and in truth I fancy so, pretty nearly. You know my grandmother is not alive! But that is something really worth looking at!"
"Can't you come to the house for supper and stay for the fireworks?" he begged pleadingly. "We'd be mighty glad to have your friend, too." Cynthia introduced her escort. "It's very good of you, Bob," she said, with that New England demureness which at times became her so well, "but we couldn't possibly do it. And then I don't like Mr. Sutton." "Oh, hang him!" exclaimed Bob.
"So you did," she assented with a touch of her old demureness, "but that doesn't say that I stayed there." "I see it doesn't," he replied. "But why didn't you?" "I guess it's because I'm not used to obeying anybody except my father," she answered evasively. "Tell me the real reason."
Here was a Japanese girl acting and talking with the freedom of an American. How was this to be explained? Difficult though it appeared, the problem was easily solved. The young lady had been in America, having spent several years in Radcliffe College. There it was that her Japanese demureness was dropped and the American frankness and vivacity of manner acquired.
"I suppose," said Marjorie, pensively, "I ought to care if you've been bad or not, but I don't." "But Marjie, darling," Leonard brought her back and went straight to his point, "were you ever really in love with that German chap you spoke of when I gave you the helmet?" "He was my first love," said Marjorie, with wicked demureness. "I was fifteen and he was eighteen."
A talent for demureness under difficulties without the cold-bloodedness which renders such a bearing natural and easy, a face and hand reigning unmoved outside a heart by nature turbulent as a wave, is a constitutional arrangement much to be desired by people in general; yet, had Ethelberta been framed with less of that gift in her, her life might have been more comfortable as an experience, and brighter as an example, though perhaps duller as a story.
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