------------------------------------------------------------------------ MRS. ESSINGTON CHAPTER I THE HOUSE-PARTY EXPLAINS ITSELF, AND GETS INTO A FOG “STILL I don’t reconcile you with that lot,” the young man broke out, after a silence that had lasted long enough to be intimate. He leaned toward her across the space between the two chairs, lifting his voice a little to be heard above the racket of the car-wheels. The woman did not directly reply, unless there was an answer in the small profile smile she gave him. She had sat for the past ten minutes admirably still, her face turned from him, her eyes on the flat blue-green of onion-fields interminably wheeling past the window. “I mean,” he presently went on in his easy fashion, “they’re hardly your sort. Oh, good people, but—dullish, you know; the kind you never put up with unless you have to.” She gave him again the flitting, profile smile, with an added twinkle, from which his face seemed to catch illumination; and, for a moment, they smiled together with the hint of some common reminiscence. “At all events,” he came back again, “I can’t see why you, of all people, would be going to the Budds!” She moved at last, turning a full look upon him. The supple bend of her long throat, and the cool gray light of her eyes in the warm shadow of their lashes, touched him like a harmony in music. The beauty and eloquence of her movements had always appealed to him as her special charm. His eyes followed the flowing lines of her attitude more attentively than his ears followed the first part of her reply. “No, they’re not our sort,”—she spoke with slight emphasis on the pronoun,—“and”—the subtle modelings around her mouth shadowed a smile—“we’ll probably bore them horribly. But I’m going—for the same reason that you are. You know I have never met Julia Budd.” “But I have,” said Fox Longacre, flushing a little, his blue eyes steadily meeting her bright gaze. “Which comes, doesn’t it, to the same thing? Aren’t we both going to ‘Miramar’ to see Miss Budd?” “She’s lovely—to look at,” he admitted. “And not in other ways?” He seemed to ponder this, his clever young face puckered with an exaggeration of gravity. He gave it up with a puzzled laugh. “’Pon my word, I don’t know! That’s what I’m going for.” “To find out—?” “Oh, whether she is perfectly charming, or—just the other thing.” It struck her that his manner was more offhand than the occasion required—that the alternative he had just so gaily admitted troubled him more than he wished her to know. But Florence Essington knew, in spite of him, more than she looked, and much more than she said. She felt that she at least foresaw so much that to spare herself the train of thought she answered him in quite another vein.