Elfrida paused and threw back her cloak. "How is it?"
she asked, posing for him with its folds gathered in either hand.
Ticke scanned her with leisurely appreciation. "It is exquisite," he articulated.
Elfrida gave him a look that might have intoxicated nerves less accustomed to dramatic effects.
"Then whistle me a cab," she said.
Mr. Ticke whistled her a cab and put her into it. There was the least pressure of his long fingers as he took her hand, and Elfrida forbade herself to resent it. She felt her own beauty so much that night that she could not complain of an enthusiasm for it in such a _belle ame_ as Golightly.
They went up to tie drawing-room together, if Elfrida and the Cardiffs, and Lady Halifax immediately introduced to Miss Bell a hollow-cheeked gentleman with a long gray beard and bushy eyebrows as a fellow-countryman. "You can compare your impressions of Hyde Park and St. Paul"s,"
said Lady Halifax, "but _don"t_ call us "Britishers." It really isn"t pretty of you."
Elfrida discovered that the bearded gentleman was princ.i.p.al of a college in Florida, and corresponded regularly at one time with the late Sir William. "It is to that," said he ornately, "that I owe the honor of joining this brilliant company to-night." He went on to state that he was over there princ.i.p.ally on account of his health--acute dyspepsia he had, it seemed he"d got out of running order generally, regularly off the track. "But I"ve just about concluded," he continued, with a pathetic twinkle under his bushy brows, "that I might have a worse reason for going back. What do you think of the meals in Victoria"s country, Miss Bell? It seems to me sometimes that I"d give the whole British Museum for a piece of Johnny-cake."
Elfrida reflected that this was not precisely what she expected to experience, and presently the hollow-cheeked Floridian was again at Lady Halifax"s elbow for disposal, while the young lady whose appearance and nationality had given him so much room for hope smilingly drifted away from him. The Cardiffs were talking to a rosy and smooth-faced round-waistcoated gentleman just returned from Siberia about the unfortunate combination of accidents by which he lost the mail-train twice in three days, and Janet had just shaken hands with a short and cheerful-looking lady astrologist.
"Behind that large person in the heliotrope brocade--she"s the wife of the _Daily Mercury_--there"s a small sofa,"
Janet said in an undertone. "I don"t think she"ll, occupy it, the-brocade looks so much, better standing--no, there she goes! Let us sit down." As they crossed the room Janet added: "In another minute we should have been shut up in a Russian prison. Daddy"s incarcerated already.
And the man told all he knew about them in the public prints a month ago." They sat down luxuriously together, and made ready, in their palm-shaded corner, to wreak the whole of their irresponsible youth upon Lady Halifax"s often venerable and always considerable guests. The warm atmosphere of the room had the perceptible charge of personalities. People in almost every part of it were trying to look unconscious as they pointed out other people.
"Tell me about everybody--everybody," said Elfrida.
"H"m! I don"t see anybody, that _is_ anybody, at this moment. Oh, there"s Sir Bradford Barker. Regard him well, for a brave soul is Sir Bradford, Frida mine."
"A soldier? At this end of the century one can"t feel an enthusiasm for killing."
"Not in the least. A member of Parliament who writes verses and won"t be intimidated by Punch into not publishing them. And the man he is talking to has just done a history of the Semitic nations. He took me down to dinner last night, and we talked in the most intelligent manner about the various ways of preparing crabs. He liked them in five styles; I wouldn"t subscribe to more than three.
That little man with the orchid that daddy has just seized is the author of the last of the "Rulers of India"
series--Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I. My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him. Daddy"s writing a thing for one of the reviews on the elective principle for India this week. He says he"s the only writer on Indian subjects who isn"t disqualified by ever having been there, and is consequently quite free of prejudice."
"Ah!" said Elfrida, "how _ba.n.a.l!_ I thought you said there would be something real here--somebody in whose garment"s hem there would be virtue."
"And I suggest the dress-coat of the historian of the Semitic nations!" Janet laughed. "Well, if nearly all our poets are dead and our novelists in the colonies, I can"t help it, can I! Here is Mr. Kendal, at all events."
Kendal came up, with his perfect manners, and immediately it seemed to Elfrida that their little group became distinct from the rest, more important, more worthy of observation. Kendal never added anything to the unities of their conversation when he joined these two; he seemed rather to break up what they had to say to each other and attract it to himself. He always gave an accent to the life and energy of their talk; but he made them both self-conscious and watchful--seemed to put them, as it were, upon their guard against one another, in a way which Janet found vaguely distressing. It was invariably as if Kendal turned their intercourse into a joust by his mere presence as spectator; as if--Janet put it plainly to herself, reddening--they mutely asked him to bestow the wreath on one of them. She almost made up her mind to ask Elfrida where their understanding went to when John Kendal came up, but she had not found it possible yet. There was an embarra.s.sing chance that Elfrida did not feel their change of att.i.tude, which would entail nameless surmises.
"You ought to be at work," Janet said severely to Kendal, "back at Barbizon or in the fields somewhere. It won"t be always June."
"Ah, would you banish him!" Elfrida exclaimed daintily.
"Surely Hyde Park is rustic enough--in June."
Kendal smiled into her face. "It combines all the charm of the country," he began.
"And the chic of the town," Elfrida finished for him gaily. "I know--I"ve seen the Boot Show."
"Extremely frivolous," Janet commented.
"Ah, now we are condemned!" Elfrida answered, and for an instant it almost seemed as if it were so.
"Daddy wants you to go and paint straggling gray stone villages in Scotland now--straggling, climbing gray stone villages with only a bit of blue at the end of the "Dead Wynd" where it turns into the churchyard gate."
"How charming!" Elfrida exclaimed.
"I suppose he has been saturating himself with Barrie,"
Kendal said. "If I could reproduce Barrie on canvas, I"d go, like a shot. By the way, Miss Bell, there"s somebody you are, interested in--do you see a middle-aged man, rather bald, thick-set, coming this way?--George Jasper."
"Really!" Elfrida exclaimed, jumping to her feet "Oh, _thank_ you! The most consummate artist in human nature that the time has given!" she added, with intensity.
"There can be no question. Oh, I am so happy to have seen him!"
"I"m not altogether sure," Kendal began, and then he stopped, looking at Janet in astonished question. Elfrida had taken half a dozen steps into the middle of the room, steps so instinct with effect that already as many heads were turned to look at her. Her eyes were large with excitement, her cheeks flushed, and she bent her head a little, almost as if to see nothing that might dissuade her from her purpose. The author of "The Alien," "A Moral Catastrophe," "Her Disciple," and a number of other volumes which cause envy and heart-burnings among publishers, in the course of his somewhat short-sighted progress across the room, paused with a confused effort to remember who this pretty girl might be who wanted to speak to him.
Elfrida said, "Pardon me!" and Mr. Jasper instantly perceived that there could be no question of that, with her face. She was holding out her hand, and he took it with absolute mystification. Elfrida had turned very pale, and a dozen people were listening. "Give me the right to say I have done this!" she said, looking at him with shy bravery in her beautiful eyes. She half sank on one knee and lifted the hand that wrote "A Moral Catastrophe" to her lips.
Mr. Jasper repossessed himself of it rather too hastily for dignity, and inwardly he expressed his, feelings by a puzzled oath. Outwardly he looked somewhat ashamed of having inspired this unknown young lady"s enthusiasm, but he did his confused best, on the spur of the moment, to carry off the situation as one of the contingencies "to which the semi-public life of a popular novelist is always subject.
"Really, you are--much too good. I can"t imagine--if the case had been reversed--"
Mr. Jasper found himself, accustomed as he was to the exigencies of London drawing-rooms, horribly in want of words. And in the bow with which he further defined his discomfort he added to it by dropping the bit of stephanotis which he wore in his b.u.t.tonhole.
Elfrida sprang to pick it up. "Oh," she cried, "broken at the stem; see, you cannot wear it anymore. May I keep it?"
A deadly silence had been widening around them, and now the daughter of the historian of the Semitic races broke it by twittering into a laugh behind her fan. Janet met Kendal"s eyes instinctively; he was burning red, and his manner was eloquent of his helplessness. Angry with herself for having waited, so long, Janet joined Elfrida just as the twitter made itself heard, and Mr. Jasper"s face began to stiffen with indignation.
"Ah, Miss Cardiff," he said with relief, "how do you do!
The rooms are rather warm, don"t you think?"
"I want to introduce you to my Am--my very great friend, Miss Bell, Mr. Jasper," Janet said quickly, as the buzz of conversation began again about them.
Elfrida turned to her reproachfully. "If I had known it was at all possible that you would do _that_," she said, "I might have--waited. But I did not know."
People were still looking at them with curious attentiveness; they were awkwardly solitary. Kendal in his corner was asking himself how she could have struck such a false note--and of all people Jasper, whose polished work held no trace of his personality, whose pleasure it was to have no public ent.i.ty whatever. As Jasper moved off almost immediately, Kendal saw his tacit discomfort in the set of his shoulders, and so sure was he of Elfrida"s embarra.s.sment that he himself slipped away to avoid adding to it.
"It was all wrong and ridiculous, and she was mad to do it," thought Janet as she drove home with her father; "but why need John Kendal have blushed for her?"
CHAPTER XVII.
"I am sure you are enjoying it," said Elfrida.
"Yes," Miss Kimpsey returned. "It"s a great treat--it"s a _very_ great treat. Everything surpa.s.ses my expectations, everything is older and blacker and more interesting than I looked for. And I must say we"re getting over a great deal in the time. Yesterday afternoon we did the entire Tower. It _did_ give one an idea. But of course you know every stone in it by now!"
"I"m afraid I"ve not seen it," Elfrida confessed gravely.
"I know it"s shocking of me."
"You haven"t visited the Tower! Doesn"t that show how benumbing opportunity is to the energies! Now I dare say that I," Miss Kimpsey went on with gratification, "coming over with a party of tourists from our State, all bound to get London and the cathedral towns and the lakes and Scotland and Paris and Switzerland into the summer vacation--I presume I may have seen more of the London sights than you have, Miss Bell." As Miss Kimpsey spoke she realized that she had had no intention of calling Elfrida "Miss Bell" when she saw her again, and wondered why she did it. "But you ought to be fond of sight-seeing, too," she added, "with your artistic nature."