She also had a charming laugh, with a liquid note in it, that made one
think of water bubbling on a dry summer day.

It was this laugh that held the room on Sunday afternoon, and
drew the handful of young men together, time after time.

Mrs. Cayhill, who, on these occasions, was wont to lay aside her book,
was virtually a deeper echo of her little daughter, and Johanna only
counted in so far as she made and distributed cups of tea at the end
of the room. She did not look with favour on the young men who
gathered there, and her manner to them was curt and unpleasing. Each
of them in turn, as he went up to her for his cup, cudgelled his brain
for something to say; but it was no easy matter to converse with
Johanna. The ordinary small change and polite commonplace of
conversation, she met with a silent contempt. In musical chit-chat,
she took no interest whatever, and pretended to none, openly indeed
"detested music," and was unable to distinguish Mendelssohn from
Wagner, "except by the noise;" while if a bolder man than the rest
rashly ventured on the literary ground that was her special demesne,
she either smiled at what he said, in a disagreeably sarcastic way, or
flatly contradicted him. She was the thorn in the flesh of these young
men; and after having dutifully spent a few awkward moments at her
side, they stole back, one by one, to the opposite end of the room.
Here Ephie, bewitchingly dressed in blue, swung to and fro in a big
American rocking-chair--going backwards, it carried her feet right off
the ground--and talked charming nonsense, to the accompaniment of her
own light laugh, and her mother's deeper notes, which went on like an
organ-point, Mrs. Cayhill finding everything Ephic said, matchlessly
amusing.