"I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you?"
Her eyes melted softly into light and life. Her strange unwomanly voice sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.
"Nobody else shall do it for me," she said at once proudly and tenderly. "Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me."
"Not even the lady there?" asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward with his hand-mirror to the place at which I was standing.
Her eyes suddenly flashed, her hand suddenly shook the comb at me, in a burst of jealous rage.
"Let her try!" cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its hoarsest notes. "Let her touch you if she dares!"
Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. "That will do, my delicate Ariel," he said. "I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse into your former self. Finish my beard."
She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus Dexter appeared to be perfectly satisfied with these results.
"I thought my little experiment might interest you," he said. "You see how it is? The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it--and it answers to my touch. She likes being played upon. But her great delight is to hear me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction; and the more I confuse her the better she likes the story. It is the greatest fun; you really must see it some day." He indulged himself in a last look at the mirror. "Ha!" he said, complacently; "now I shall do. Vanish, Ariel!"
She tramped out of the room in her heavy boots, with the mute obedience of a trained animal. I said "Good-night" as she passed me. She neither returned the salutation nor looked at me: the words simply produced no effect on her dull senses. The one voice that could reach her was silent. She had relapsed once more into the vacant inanimate creature who had opened the gate to us, until it pleased Miserrimus Dexter to speak to her again.
"Valeria!" said my mother-in-law. "Our modest host is waiting to see what you think of him."