“So it may be, my dear child—not that I think it is. But it’s absolutely without merit; it’s very very bad. It could hardly be worse. If she went all over London I doubt if she could find a more ridiculous thing calling itself a work of art. Can’t you see it’s like those little figures they used to have on old-fashioned Twelfth Cakes, made of sugar.”
“No, I can’t. Shut up! I mayn’t know quite so much as you, but ever since I was a child everybody’s always said I was very artistic.”
They were sitting in her mother’s drawing-room in Camden Hill. Rupert glanced round it: it was a deplorable example of misdirected aims and mistaken ambitions; a few yards of beaded curtains which separated it from another room gratified Moona with the satisfactory sensation that her surroundings were Oriental. As a matter of fact, the decoration was so commonplace and vulgar that to attempt to describe it would be painful to the writer whilst having no sort of effect on the reader, since it was almost indescribable. From the decorative point of view, the room was the most unmeaning of failures, the most complete of disasters.
Rupert had hoped, nevertheless, to cultivate her taste, and educate her generally. He was most anxious of all to explain to her that, so far from being artistic, she was the most pretentious of little Philistines. Why, indeed, should she be anything else? It was the most irritating absurdity that she should think she was, or wish to be.
Rupert was growing weary of this, and beginning to think his object was hopeless.
A certain amount of excitement that she had created in him by her brusque rudeness, her high spirits, even the jarring of her loud laugh, was beginning to lose its effect; or rather the effect was changed. Instead of attracting, it irritated him.
About another small subject they had a quarrel—she was beginning to order him about, to regard him as her young man, her property—and was getting accustomed to what had surprised her at first—that he didn’t make love to her. She had ordered him to take her somewhere and he had refused on the ground that he wanted to stop at home and think!
She let herself go, and when Moona Chivvey lost her temper it was not easily forgotten. She insulted him, called him a blighter, a silly ass, a mass of affectation.
He accepted it with gallant irony, bowing with a chivalrous humility that drove her nearly mad, but he never spoke to her again.