“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,—”
The silence for that had been so general that even Barney, far away, and protected by Mrs. Aldesey, was aware of it.
“How wonderfully he wears, doesn’t he, dear old Browning,” said Mrs. Aldesey, and in the glance that Barney cast upon her was an oddly mingled gratitude and worry. The fair young American, he was very fair and had clear, charming eyes, finished the verse in a low voice to Meg and Meg looked at him affectionately the while. He was evidently one of Adrienne’s appurtenances.
It was a dull dinner. Pretty, festive Mrs. Pope and young Mr. Haviland, reputed to be a wit and one of Meg’s young men as Mrs. Pope was one of Barney’s young women, would not with any eagerness again attend a board where the hostess quoted Browning and didn’t know better than to send you down, the first with a stern young socialist who sat silent for the most part and frowned when addressed, and the second with a jocular, middle-aged lady from California, the mother, Oldmeadow gathered, of the clear-eyed youth, from whose ample bosom Mr. Haviland’s subtle arrows glanced aside leaving him helplessly exposed to the stout bludgeonings of her humour. Adrienne paused once or twice in her conversation to smile approval upon her compatriot and to draw Lord Lumley’s attention to her special brand of merriment, good Lord Lumley adjusting his glasses obediently to take it in.
And now they were all assembled in the drawing-room. Like everything about Adrienne, it was simple and rather splendid. Barney had wisely kept his modernities for his own study and it was a pity, Oldmeadow reflected, that Adrienne had not kept for her own boudoir the large portrait of herself that hung over the mantelpiece, since it was a note more irrelevant than any Post Impressionist could have been and cast a shade of surmise over the taste displayed in the Chippendale furniture and the Chinese screens.
“Rather sweet, isn’t it; pastoral and girlish, you know,” Barney had suggested tentatively as Mrs. Aldesey had placed herself before it. “Done in Paris a good many years ago; the man was very much the fashion then. Adrienne was only sixteen. It’s an extraordinarily perfect likeness still, isn’t it?”
To which Mrs. Aldesey, all old lace and exquisite evasion, had murmured, her lorgnette uplifted: “Quite dear and ingenuous. Such a relief after your arid Cubists. What would they make of Mrs. Barney en bergère, I’d like to know? A jumble of packing-cases with something twisted in a corner to signify a bleat.”
For the picture, painted with glib assurance and abounding in pink and azure, portrayed Adrienne dressed as a shepherdess and carrying a flower-wreathed crook.
Adrienne, to-night at all events, was looking very unlike the shepherdess, but that might be because of the approaches of her maternity. Mrs. Chadwick, when he had last been at Coldbrooks, had told him that the baby was expected in May and that Adrienne was wonderful about it, dedicating herself to its perfection in thought and deed with every conscious hour.
“If only I’d thought about my babies before they came like that, who knows what they might have turned out!” she had surmised. “But I was very silly, I’m afraid, and the only thing I really did think of was how I should dress them. I’ve always loved butcher’s-blue linen for children and I must say that mine did look very nice in it. For everyday, you know.”