"They've been at it a long while, and they know how, and they're light-hearted as robins.

They have more fun than people who have responsibilities." All of these lively demoiselles fluttered about Harkless with commiserative pleasantries, and, in spite of his protestations, made him recline in the biggest and deepest chair on the porch, where they surfeited him with kindness and grouped about him with extra cushions and tenderness for a man who had been injured.

No one mentioned the fact that he had been hurt; it was not spoken of, though they wished mightily he would tell them the story they had read luridly in the public prints.
They were very good to him.

One of them, in particular, a handsome, dark, kind-eyed girl, constituted herself at once his cicerone in Rouen gossip and his waiting-maid.

She sat by him, and saw that his needs (and his not-needs, too) were supplied and oversupplied; she could not let him move, and anticipated his least wish, though he was now amply able to help himself; and she fanned him as if he were a dying consumptive.
They sat on Meredith's big porch in the late twilight and ate a substantial refection, and when this was finished, a buzz of nonsense rose from all quarters, except the remote corners where the youthful affianced ones had defensively stationed themselves behind a rampart of plants.