Sophie went flitting up the garden-path toward the house, and in a
moment more the sisters were in one another's arms. Bressant, glad of
the concealment afforded by the shrubbery, remained gazing moodily at
the fountain, his head on his hand. The two girls entered the house, and
sat down in the professor's study, where the old gentleman (who had been
the first to meet Cornelia) sat enclouding himself with smoke, but
betraying no other symptom of his huge delight.
"But how came you to get here so soon, you dear darling?" said Sophie,
looking with lighted eyes at her sister. "We thought it would be a week
at least."
"Oh, bless your heart, I couldn't wait, you know. So awfully tired I got
of seeing new things and people. Dear me!"--and Cornelia threw herself
back in her chair and uplifted her gloved hands in a little gesture of
ineffability--"you would never imagine what a bore society is, after
all."
The professor, from his cloud, cast, unobserved, a glance of quiet
scrutiny at his daughter. A certain jaunty embroidery of tone and manner
struck him at once--she wasn't quite the same simple little woman who
had gone to New York two months ago. Well, well, they would wear off,
perhaps, these little affectations; and then, too, it was not to be
expected of her that she'd be a girl all her life. They all must needs
pass through this stage to something better--or worse: all women of pith
and passion like Cornelia.
"How did you leave Aunt Margaret?" inquired he.
"Oh, désolée, because I would go away," replied Cornelia, with a very
pretty laugh. "She vowed she could have spared me much better six weeks
earlier; for, you see, after I'd learned the ropes, and how to take care
of myself, I became, as she expressed it, 'such a dear, sweet,
invaluable little attachée.'"
Sophie laughed at the comical air with which her sister repeated the
sentence; yet, when her laugh was gone, there remained a slight shadow
of disappointment. She, too, was unwillingly aware of some alteration.
"Is she such a grand lady as you expected?" asked she.
"Oh, my dear, grandeur's a humbug, let me tell you. Gracious! by the
time I'd been there a week, I could put it on as well as anybody. Aunt
Margaret, she was no end of a swell, and all that; but, as for
grandeur!--And she was such an odd old thing. Sometimes I seemed to like
her, and sometimes she almost made me faint. Once in a while I thought
she was trying to pump me about something; though, to be sure, there was
nothing in me to be pumped. I told her about Abbie, for one thing, as
much as I knew, and she seemed awfully interested--it was put on, I
suppose, very likely; and yet she really did seem to mean it. I remember
she couldn't get over my forgetting Abbie's last name: she even told me
to mention it the first time I wrote to her. So queer of the old
person."