“Rupert would never do that! He’s intensely polite; politeness is ingrained in his nature. I’m rather hopeless about it all; and yet when I think how sometimes when I speak to him and he doesn’t answer but gives that slight smile …”
“How well I know that slight, superior smile—discouraging yet spurring you on to further efforts! … Rupert—Rupert! What a name! How can people be called Rupert? It isn’t done, you’re not living in a feuilleton, you must change the man’s name, dear.”
“Indeed I sha’n’t! Nonsense; it’s a beautiful name! Rupert Denison! It suits him; it suits me. Bertha, you can’t deny it’s a handsome, noble face, like a Vandyke portrait of Charles I, or one of those people in the National Gallery. And he must take a certain amount of interest in me, because he wants me to learn more, to be more cultured. He’s so accomplished! He knows simply everything. The other day he sent me a book about the early Italian masters.”
“Did he, though? How jolly!”
“A little volume of Browning, too—that tiny edition, beautifully bound.”
Bertha made an inarticulate sound.
“And you know he found out my birthday, and sent me a few dark red roses and Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.”
“Nothing like being up to date,” said Bertha. “Right up to the day after to-morrow! Rupert always is. How did he find out your birthday?”
“How do you suppose?”
“I can’t think. By looking in Who’s Who?—going to Somerset House or the British Museum?”