"Perhaps you wouldn't if he did."

"I like people to be human. Mr. Farron's not human."

"Doesn't your mother think so?"

"Mama thinks he's perfect."

"How long have they been married?"

"Ages! Five years!"

"And they're just as much in love?"

Miss Severance looked at him.

"In love?" she said. "At their age?" He laughed at her, and she added:
"I don't mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
forty-five. What I mean by love--" she hesitated.

"Don't stop."

But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.

She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the friendly
light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be actually
girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for such a word.
Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother. Mrs. Farron's
hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where it curved behind
her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with such hair, and a
high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were fine and
excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.

"Mama, this is Mr. Wayne," said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one, she
supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all very
calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more comfortable
than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind whether she
ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new or one of the
ones she had seen a dozen times before?

There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron's manner, but, like a
great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most trivial
sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had learned the
perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not wholly desert her
even in the dentist's chair.

She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.

"No tea, my dear," she said. "I've just had it," she added to Wayne,
"with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta," she threw over her shoulder to
Mathilde. "I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full of my
relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I'm their only connection
with the vulgar, modern world.