"Oh, father," cried the girl, still more faintly, devoutly thankful
the carriage was dark.
"I don't know that; but he admired her dress."
Catherine did not say to herself in the dark, "My dress only?" Mrs.
Penniman's announcement struck her by its richness, not by its
meagreness.
"You see," said her father, "he thinks you have eighty thousand a
year."
"I don't believe he thinks of that," said Mrs. Penniman; "he is too
refined."
"He must be tremendously refined not to think of that!"
"Well, he is!" Catherine exclaimed, before she knew it.
"I thought you had gone to sleep," her father answered. "The hour
has come!" he added to himself. "Lavinia is going to get up a
romance for Catherine. It's a shame to play such tricks on the girl.
What is the gentleman's name?" he went on, aloud.
"I didn't catch it, and I didn't like to ask him. He asked to be
introduced to me," said Mrs. Penniman, with a certain grandeur; "but
you know how indistinctly Jefferson speaks." Jefferson was Mr.
Almond. "Catherine, dear, what was the gentleman's name?"
For a minute, if it had not been for the rumbling of the carriage,
you might have heard a pin drop.
"I don't know, Aunt Lavinia," said Catherine, very softly. And, with
all his irony, her father believed her.
CHAPTER V
He learned what he had asked some three or four days later, after
Morris Townsend, with his cousin, had called in Washington Square.
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