It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug, swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. “The Boy with the Sword” for the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington, and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge. Wayne kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings, astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes even the robust in museums.
Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.
“How beautifully you know your way about here!” she said. “I suppose you’ve brought lots of girls here before me.”
“A glorious army,” said Pete, “the matron and the maid. You ought to see my mother in a museum. She’s lost before she gets well inside the turnstile.”
But Mathilde was thinking.
“How strange it is,” she observed, “that I never should have thought before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one else to marry you?”
Wayne nodded.
“Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having rather a rotten time.”
“Were you in love with her?”
He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their teacher. “Jade,” said the voice of the lady, “one of the hardest of known substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial—”