to picture you gazing at your reflection in a pool—looking awfully picturesque and all that."
Leigh looked delighted. "How I wish I had been Narcissus! The rôle would have suited me perfectly—gazing and gazing, and adoring—myself! We'd better go ahead and wash, old fellow. The girls are gone, and I hear the first dinner gong." He flung a snowy-white embroidered towel to Finch and went back to the bedroom whistling. He knew that young Whiteoak was embarrassed, shy, and he wanted to put him at his ease.
He wanted very much to gain Finch's confidence, even his love. He felt extraordinarily drawn to the boy, whom he looked upon as much younger than himself, though the difference was only two years. Still, Finch was at school yet, while he was in his second year at Varsity. There was something in Finch's gaunt face and sad eyes that he found himself constantly remembering, trying to clarify into a definite attraction. From chance phrases, allusions that Finch had let fall, he felt that he was misunderstood at home, that there was no one there to appreciate the sensitive depths of his nature, no one to love him with understanding and sympathy. He himself had been always so enfolded in love and understanding. He must ask Finch about his family, try to learn something that night of the setting of his life. He could not quite make him out. He knew that his grandfather had been an officer in India, that his family owned a lot of land, but Finch was so rough at times, so almost uncouth. . . . He brushed his waving brown hair before the glass till it shone.
Finch had not been able to bring himself to the point of using the embroidered towel. He had hung it carefully among others of its kind on the glass rack, and had rubbed his face and hands dry on a corner of a bath towel. He now appeared in the doorway very shining with a damp lock on his forehead and his long red wrists protruding pathetically from the sleeves of his blue serge coat.
In the drawing-room they found Leigh's mother and sister. Two sisters, Finch thought at first, the mother looked so young.