If Catherine was quiet, she
was quietly quiet, as I may say, and her pathetic effects, which
there was no one to notice, were entirely unstudied and unintended.
If the Doctor was stiff and dry and absolutely indifferent to the
presence of his companions, it was so lightly, neatly, easily done,
that you would have had to know him well to discover that, on the
whole, he rather enjoyed having to be so disagreeable. But Mrs.
Penniman was elaborately reserved and significantly silent; there was
a richer rustle in the very deliberate movements to which she
confined herself, and when she occasionally spoke, in connexion with
some very trivial event, she had the air of meaning something deeper
than what she said. Between Catherine and her father nothing had
passed since the evening she went to speak to him in his study. She
had something to say to him--it seemed to her she ought to say it;
but she kept it back, for fear of irritating him. He also had
something to say to her; but he was determined not to speak first.
He was interested, as we know, in seeing how, if she were left to
herself, she would "stick." At last she told him she had seen Morris
Townsend again, and that their relations remained quite the same.
"I think we shall marry--before very long. And probably, meanwhile,
I shall see him rather often; about once a week, not more."
The Doctor looked at her coldly from head to foot, as if she had been
a stranger.
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