ittedly a very personable fellow--piqued Tom's male
vanity, so that he rallied her with:

"But by the way, why did you vanish so early, why didn't you stay with us
after dinner last night?"

"I did not want to vanish," she answered. "Nothing is more delightful
than hearing my father talk. But had I stayed Miss Bilson would have
supposed herself free to stay too, and that would have spoiled the
evening. My father doesn't choose to talk freely before Miss Bilson,
because she gets into a foolish excited state and interrupts and asks
questions. She overflows with admiration and that annoys and bores him."

"'She brought him butter in a lordly dish,'" Tom quoted. "The ill-advised
Bilson. Can't one just see her!"

"And it is not her place to admire out loud," Damaris continued. "Over
and over again I have tried to explain that to her. But in some ways, she
is not at all clever. She can't or won't understand, and only tells Aunt
Felicia I am wanting in sympathy and that I hurt her feelings. She has
unreasonably many feelings, I think, and they are so easily hurt. I
always know when the hurting takes place because she sniffs and then
plays Mendelssohn's Songs without Words on the schoolroom piano."

Tom chuckled. She had a caustic tongue on occasion, this
nymph-like creature!

"Alas, poor Bilson!" he said. "For, as Sir Charles walked across the
garden with us down to the ferry, didn't I hear those same sugary
melodies tinkling out of some upper open window?"

"I am afraid you did. You see she had made up her mind to come with me."

"And you were forced to intimate you found yourself quite equal to
conducting the expedition unshepherded?"

"I did not mean to be unkind, but she would have been so dreadfully in
the way"--

Damaris gathered up a handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble
down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she
gazed away out to sea.

"This is a day by itself," she said. "It looks like jewels, topazes,
turquoise, and pearls; and it seems full of things which half tell
themselves, and then hide from or pass you by.--I wanted to watch it all
and think; and, she doesn't do it on purpose I know, but somehow Miss
Bilson always interferes with my thinking."

Both the tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling
to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental;
and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was
unw