fallen
lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the
exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.
She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black,
roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well
as she might if she had chosen. The elderly man on her right, it was
easy to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair
hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers. He wore his
beard cut in the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic
mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close;
and there was something Gallic in its effect and something remotely
military: he had blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though
be frowned a good deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato
quickness, as if challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the
humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner
of his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once
questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them. He
responded to March's bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose
mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely
bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness. She was
brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on
her pretty nose.

If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once
renew itself in that form. Nothing was said while they were having their
first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to
show how fully they had misunderstood it. The gentleman at the head
of the table intervened at last, and then, "I'm obliged to you," March
said, "for your German. I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat
pocket."

"Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other. "It was merely their
kind of English."

The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes
people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made
every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect
of being tacitly amused.

The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, "You may not get what you
ordered, but it will be good."

"Even if you don't know wh