Her father followed her, as different a figure as imagination could suggest. He was very tall, very thin, with long legs and stooping shoulders, his hair in limp locks, his shirt-collar open, a velvet coat--looking as entirely adapted to the locality, the conventional right man in the right place, as she was not the conventional woman. A gloomy look, which was habitual to him, a fretful longitudinal pucker in his forehead, the hollow lines of ill health in his cheeks, disguised the fact that he was, or had been, a handsome man; just as his extreme spareness and thinness made it difficult to believe that he had also been a very powerful one. Nor was he at all old, save in the very young eyes of his daughter, to whom forty-five was venerable. He might have been an artist or a poet of a misanthropical turn of mind; though, when a man has chronic asthma, misanthropy is unnecessary to explain his look of pain, and fatigue, and disgust with the outside world. He walked languidly, his shoulders up to his ears, and followed Frances to the table, and sat down with that air of dissatisfaction which takes the comfort out of everything. Frances either was inaccessible to this kind of discomfort, or so accustomed to it that she did not feel it. She sat serenely opposite to him, and talked of indifferent things. “Don’t take the mayonnaise, if you don’t like it, papa; there is something else coming that will perhaps be better. Mariuccia does not at all pride herself upon her mayonnaise.” “Mariuccia knows very little about it; she has not even the sense to know what she can do best.” He took a little more of the dish, partly out of contradiction, which was the result which Frances hoped. “The lettuce is so crisp and young, that makes it a little better,” she said, with the air of a connoisseur. “A little better is not the word; it is very good,” he said, fretfully; then added with a slight sigh, “Everything is better for being young.” “Except people, I know. Why does young mean good with vegetables and everything else, and silly only when it is applied to people?--though it can’t be helped, I know.” “That is one of your metaphysical questions,” he said, with a slight softening of his tone. “Perhaps because of human jealousy. We all like to discredit what we haven’t got, and most people you see are no longer young.” “Oh, do you think so, papa? I think there are more young people than old people.” “I suppose you are right, Fan; but they don’t count for so much, in the way of opinion at least. What has called forth these sage remarks?” “Only the lettuce,” she said, with a laugh. Then, after a pause, “For instance, there were six or seven children in the party we met to-day, and only two parents.” “There are seldom more than two parents, my dear.”