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. That he should have paid off his brother's debt at one stroke was to the young man a conceivable feat; but that he should go on methodically and uninterruptedly accumulating the needed amount, under the perpetual accusation of Irene's inadequate frocks and Mrs. Carstyle's apologies for the mutton, seemed to Vibart proof of unexampled heroism. Mr. Carstyle was as inaccessible as the average American parent, and led a life so detached from the preoccupations of his womankind that Vibart had some difficulty in fixing his attention. To Mr. Carstyle, Vibart was simply the inevitable young man who had been hanging about the house ever since Irene had left school; and Vibart's efforts to differentiate himself from this enamored abstraction were hampered by Mrs. Carstyle's cheerful assumption that he was the young man, and by Irene's frank appropriation of his visits.
