And the next evening, and the next, and the next, so long as Aunt Mary and Aunt Hester remained at the Manor House, the evenings passed in a similar fashion; and, notwithstanding the doleful faces they occasionally assumed, they found pleasure in lamenting the follies of the young people. The same stories were told, almost the same words were uttered. The only malcontent was Willy. He had no interest in his sisters, and the hours after dinner in the billiard-room when his sisters were in the drawing-room were those he devoted to looking through his letters and filling up his diary; so when Sally's name was mentioned he caught at his short crisp hair and gnashed his teeth. VI “My dear fellow, just as I'm settling down to do some work, Aunt Mary comes along the passage; I know her step so well. And then it begins, the old story that I have heard twenty times before, all over again. You have no idea how worrying it is.” Frank laughed, and talked of something else. These discussions of Sally's character and general behaviour did not appeal to him in either a comic or serious light, and the havoc they made of Willy's business hours did not perceptibly move him; he was full of his good looks, his clothes, his affections, his bull-dog, and the fact that his youth was going by, as it should go by, among girls, in an old English village, in a garden by the sea. Aunt Mary was a woman that a rarer young man would have been attracted by; indeed the delicacy of a young man may be tested by the sympathy he may feel for women when age has drawn a veil over, and put sexual promptings aside. Her bright teeth and eyes, the winsome little face, so glad, would have at once charmed and led any young man not so brutally young as Frank Escott. It would have pleased another to watch her, to wait on her, to listen to her rambling stories all so full of laughter and the sunshine of kindness and homely wit; it would have pleased him to note that she was gratified by the admiration of a young man; it would please him to hear himself called by his Christian name, while he must address her as Mrs. So-and-so, and in maintaining this difference they would both become conscious of pleasing restraint. His comprehension of life was invariably a sentimental one, so the aunts were to him merely middle-aged women--uninteresting, and useful only so far as their efforts contributed to render the lives of young people easy and pleasurable. In abrupt and passing impressions he concluded that Aunt Mary was bright and pleasant, but tediously voluble, given to wasting that time which he would have liked to spend talking to the young ladies of poetry and Italy.