"I can't believe it is anything more than vulgar curiosity," said Leslie, after a thoughtful pause. "You know people of that sort have so little to occupy their minds that they become inordinately curious about the personal doings and sayings of the people they live among. I don't suppose a delivery wagon goes by in the street that Mrs. Bussey does not know about it, and speculate as to where it is going and what it is going to deliver at whose house. If she were not so curious about everything, I might feel that this was a more serious matter. But--she is so inefficient! I can't imagine her a mysterious conspirator!"
"Well, let's forget her. Won't you play some more for me?"
"I'd rather talk," she said. "There are some things I want to ask you."
"I want you to tell me about Philip's mother."
"Very well," he said, but the eagerness had faded out of his voice. "What in particular?"
"You are a great friend of hers, are you not?"
"It was to please her, rather than Philip, that you came here?"
"Yes," he said. He knew that something more than this tame acquiescence was really due from him, but he felt suddenly as barren of invention as ever Mrs. Bussey could have been.
Leslie touched the keys of the piano softly and absent-mindedly as she asked her next question. "What does she look like? Is she very beautiful?"
"I have always thought so," said Burton. "She is a little woman, compared with you,--tiny, but very imperious and queenly. When she tells me to do a thing, I go and do it, without any objection."
Burton laughed. "Goodness knows! I never tried it."
"Then she probably looks younger than she is. How young does she look?"
"Oh,--as though she had been caught in an eddy somewhere between twenty-five and thirty!"
"And would stay there. I see. And she dresses exquisitely, doesn't she?"
"Is she contemptuous of those who do not dress exquisitely? Or merely tolerant?"
Burton felt rather uncomfortable under these probing questions, but he understood something of the girl's mood, and he could not resent the trace of defiance that he caught under rather than in her words. He therefore answered gently:
"I think that if she likes a person, she likes him whole-heartedly, and without regard to the accidental attributes. She will like you. She will love you."