"
Vibart had listened attentively.
"I wonder what Miss Carstyle thinks of it?" he mused.
Mrs. Vance looked at him with a tentative smile. "I wonder what _you_
think of Miss Carstyle?" she returned,
His answer reassured her.
"I think she takes after her mother," he said.
"Ah," cried his aunt cheerfully, "then I needn't write to _your_ mother,
and I can have Irene at all my parties!"
Miss Carstyle was an important factor in the restricted social
combinations of a Millbrook hostess. A local beauty is always a useful
addition to a Saturday-to-Monday house-party, and the beautiful Irene was
served up as a perennial novelty to the jaded guests of the summer colony.
As Vibart's aunt remarked, she was perfect till she became playful, and
she never became playful till the third day.
Under these conditions, it was natural that Vibart should see a good deal
of the young lady, and before he was aware of it he had drifted into the
anomalous position of paying court to the daughter in order to ingratiate
himself with the father. Miss Carstyle was beautiful, Vibart was young,
and the days were long in his aunt's spacious and distinguished house; but
it was really the desire to know something more of Mr. Carstyle that led
the young man to partake so often of that gentleman's overdone mutton.
Vibart's imagination had been touched by the discovery that this little
huddled-up man, instead of travelling with the wind, was persistently
facing a domestic gale of considerable velocity.
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