—his ideas were so delightfully "your deal, my love"—clear, his illustrations so sweetly pretty, and his manner so earnest; really, he stirred her like—"hearts, did you say?—a trump."
Josephine Splurge contented herself with letting down her back hair for Mr. Withers and making eyes at him.
"Good-morrow to the guileless Genevieve!"—Withers delighted in dispensing equivocal nothings to the dowdy Muse of the sofa and back hair.—"Charming weather!"
"There, you bewildering Joseph Surface, you need not go on,—I know what you are going to say, and I will neither be flattered nor fascinated. Come, confess now, like a dear candid creature, throw off your irresistibly bewitching mask, and own that your sentiments are all rhetoric."
"Josy, dear," Adelaide would insinuate, "what a wonderful memory you have!—so well managed, too! Now whom did you hear say that?"
Josephine was wont to declare that the Admirable Crichton lived again in that kaleidoscopic creature; but he was so dazzling, so bewildering, so dangerous, that to converse with him was like having fireworks in one's boudoir.
With Madeline Withers was on strange terms, if any terms at all. She threatened to him in the middle of his best stories, smiled quietly when he preached, yawned to his poetical recitations, left the room when he sang, mistook the subjects of his sketches with a verisimilitude of innocence that often deceived even himself, was silent and sneered much whenever he was present. And all these rudenesses she performed with a successful air of genuine abstraction; they never failed of their intention by being overdone, or by being too directly directed at him.
Remarks seldom passed between these two; when they did, Withers spoke always first, and Madeline replied briefly and with politeness. And yet there were occasions when a sharp-sighted and suspicious observer might have detected a strange discomposure in Madeline's conduct in the presence of Withers,—when, indeed, she seemed to be laboring under irritability, and proneness to singular excitement, which began with his entrance and disappeared with his departure. At such times she would break her haughty quiet with fierce sallies upon her sisters; but Withers stung her back into silence with sharp and telling retorts,—as you may have seen a practised beast-tamer in a cage flog an angry tigress, when her eyes flashed, and her ears were set back, and she unsheathed her horrid claws, and lashed her sides, and growled with all the appalling fee-faw-fum of the jungle,—flog her back into her corner, with nought more formidable than a lady's riding-whip, dainty, slender, and sharp. But Withers administered the chastisement with such devilish grace that it was unperceived, save by the quick, shrewd Adelaide perhaps, who perceived everything,—but never saw, nor ever spoke. If you could have beheld the lips and the eyes of Madeline, on such occasions, you would have cursed this Philip Withers, or beaten him to her feet.
Between Withers and Adelaide the relations were plainer; indeed, before the small Splurge set they appeared as avowed lovers. Toward "Addy" Withers was all elegant devotion and gracious gallantry, knight-like in his chivalric and debonair devoir.
For Withers Addy was, openly, all deference and tenderly wistful solicitude, but in secret not all security and exultation. Even while it seemed high triumph in her heart's camp, her well-drilled eyes and ears were still on guard, and her hidden thoughts lay upon their arms.
Still it wore the aspect of a lyric match, and the hearts of humbler Hendrik lovers set it to music.
"For other guests," Withers seemed to say,
"I wile the hours with tale or song,
Or web of fancy, fringed with careless rhyme;
But how to find a fitting lay for thee,
Who hast the harmonies of every time?"
