"And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?" he asked, glancing
slyly at Miss Guion.

"Like that," Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of
her mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of
severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the
play up till her lips quivered.

"It is like him," Miss Guion laughed.

"Is he as stiff as all that?" the professor inquired.

"Not stiff," Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."

"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia
herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart,
they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a
good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues
that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces
in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."

Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being
pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior,
initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of England
into colonial and Indian garrison towns--a manner Drusilla had acquired
notably well, considering that not ten years previous her life had been
bounded by American college class-days. Something of this latter fact
persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and style of doing
her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter spent with her