"My special ones are so shorn it would be scarcely decent to paint them,
and a few are already quite black. But they all like tea--from my hands.
It knits them together in a nice soft woolly way. And St. George will
probably stroll in with the Alpine glow of a sermon-in-the-making still
lighting up his eyes. And he will be introduced to you and drop crumbs
on my lovely Persian rug, and ask to have the gramophone started. He
loves it. Often I think our friends must go away and complain of being
gramophoned to death by a wild clergyman. So out with what you have to
ask me, my dear man, or the enemy will be upon us."
Carleton got up, with his hands in his pockets, and stared out of the
window which looked down from a seemingly great height over the
turquoise sea. He could see a train from Italy tearing along a curve of
the green and golden coast, like a dark knight charging full tilt toward
the foe, a white plume swept back from his helmet. Suddenly the smooth
blue surface of the sea was broken by the rush of a motor-boat
practising for a forthcoming race, a mere buzzing feather of foam, with
a sound like the beating of an excited heart, heard after taking some
drug to exaggerate the pulsation. Yet Carleton was hardly conscious of
what he saw or heard. He was thinking how best to ask Rose Winter to
make Miss Grant's acquaintance. Several ways occurred to him, but at
last he blurted out something quite different from what he had planned.
"There's a girl--a lady--I--I want to get your opinion about," he
stammered, turning red, because he knew that Rose was looking at him
with a dangerously innocent expression in her eyes.
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