The evening seemed long to Frances, though it was not long. Constance trifled over the tea--which Mariuccia made with much reluctance--for half an hour. But she talked all the time; and as her talk was of people Frances had never heard of, and was mingled with little allusions to what had passed before,--“I told you about him;” “You remember, we were talking of them;” with a constant recurrence of names which to Frances meant nothing at all,--it seemed long to her.
She sat down at the table, and took her knitting, and listened, and tried to look as if she took an interest. She did indeed take a great interest; no one could have been more eager to enter without _arrière-pensée_ into the new life thus unfolded before her; and sometimes she was amused and could laugh at the stories Constance was telling; but her chief feeling was that sense of being entirely “out of it”--having nothing to do with it--which makes people who do not understand society feel like so many ghosts standing on the margin, knowing nothing. The feeling was strange and very forlorn. It is an unpleasant experience even for those who are strangers, to whom it is a passing incident; but as the speaker was her sister and the listener her father, Frances felt this more deeply still. Generally in the evening conversation flagged between them. He would have his book, and Frances sometimes had a book too, or a drawing upon which she could work, or at least her knitting. She had felt that the silence which reigned in the room on such occasions was not what ought to be. It was not like the talk which was supposed to go on in all the novels she had ever read where the people were _nice_. And sometimes she attempted to entertain her father with little incidents in the life of their poor neighbours, or things which Mariuccia had told her; but he listened benevolently, with his finger between the leaves of his book, or even without closing his book, looking up at her over the leaves--only out of kindness to her, not because he was interested; and then silence would fall on them, a silence which was very sweet to Frances, in the midst of which her own little stream of thoughts flowed on continuously, but which now and then she was struck to the heart to think must be very dull for papa.
