“Worse than that—­she’s a Jere Lansdale,” was my response, though I tactfully left it unuttered for an “Indeed?” that seemed less emotional.  I could voice my deeper conviction not more explicitly than by saying further to Miss Caroline, “Perhaps that explains why she has the effect of making her mother seem positively immature.”

“My mother is positively immature,” remarked the daughter, with the air of telling something she had found out long since.

“Then perhaps the other is the false effect,” I ventured.  “It is your mother’s immaturity that makes you seem so—­” I thought it kind to hesitate for the word, but Miss Lansdale said, again confidently:—­

“Oh, but I really am,” and this with a finality that seemed to close the incident.

Her voice had the warm little roughness of a thrush’s, which sings through a throat that is loosely strung with wires of soft gold.

“In my day,” began Miss Caroline; but here I rebelled, no longer perceiving any good reason to be overborne by her daughter.  I could endure only a certain amount of that.

“Your day is to-day,” I interrupted, “and to-morrow and many to-morrows.  You are a woman bereft of all her yesterdays.  Let your daughter have had her day—­let her have come to an incredible maturity.  But you stay here in to-day with me.  We won’t be fit companions for her, but she shall not lack for company.  Uncle Jerry Honeycutt is now ninety-four, and he has a splendid new ear-trumpet—­he will be rarely diverting for Miss Lansdale.”

But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my friendly advances.  It occurred to me now that her self-possession was remarkable.  It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too closely.  I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing school for young ladies.  I was tempted to suspect the latter, for, physically, the creature was by no means formidable.  Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a completed slenderness, I might say—­a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme.  It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit.

Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment.  I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my conduct.

Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the stanch regard of Miss Caroline.  My passion for that sprightly dame and her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to her trained eye our need to be “finished.”