Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/65

So now, if you are not alarmed at, repelled by, the prospect of a riddle, a puzzle—oh, but a very charming puzzle in brown hair and hazel eyes and sensitive contours . . . !

Mrs. Silverdale, if she did not openly bemoan her fate, yet intimated tolerably plainly her resentment at the trick which nature had played upon her; and, far from in sympathy though I felt with her, I could not deny that, from her point of view, there might be an excuse for her attitude. Her attitude? But, in truth, that is hardly the word; it was more a resigned recognition that there was no possible attitude to be taken up, a kind of mental huddle, a backboneless disapproval, an appallingly silent silence.

From the culprit herself, little aggression could be complained of; Lucille was, perhaps, as much ashamed of her inconvenience, her inconvenance, as were the most robust-minded of her family; but (it seemed to me) this very modesty, this very agreement with their envisagement of the situation, did but add an irritation the more to her personality.

Strange enough it was, too; one is used to see it taken so differently, that perfunctory law whereby the ages free themselves from the muffling oblivion of mankind—that poking, freakish finger that heredity sticks in our eyes, as we peer anxiously to see if the veil be decorously thrown over all. The tears it brings—that mocking inexorable finger—are not always of those that purify our mental vision; and of the Silverdales' sight, so far as that concerned itself with this slender, humorous maiden, it had made miniature havoc.

That, after all these dear mediocre centuries, he should re-assert himself—that ancestor, who in the days of Herrick and Suckling had held his own wittily, gloriously, with the best of them! One might have hoped that decades upon decades of ignoring,of