“I had hoped to see him every day,” she owned, and Camelia realized the power of a negative attitude—how flat beside it, how feeble, was her exaggeratedly affirmative one. All her pretty conciliations were as nothing to Lady Henge beside the stinging interest of Perior’s dislike.
“I think he may help me about so many things, I so often feel a helplessness in self-expression; the idea is there—but the form! the form! ah, my dear, art, after all, is form.” (This piece of information was certainly bitter to our martyrized heroine.)
“As you said, his severity may, to a certain extent, be conservatism, academic narrowness, but I have always heard of him as widely appreciative.”
Camelia could answer for the width of appreciation that her resentment had falsified on the unlucky night of the first performance; she remembered now, with a little flush, that her saddling of him with tastes not his own must have seemed to him the culmination of spiteful pettiness. And then he had not rejoined—had not defended himself, even against that intimation of academics opposed to his dearly loved Schumann. Camelia could soothe herself with an “I don’t care! He deserved it. He was horrid;” but all the same the memory brought a hotness to her cheeks. She felt very angry, too, with Lady Henge, and, while smiling pleasantly, found some satisfaction in various cynical mental comments on the weighty intricacy of her cap, and the vast stupidity of her self-absorption.
“Do you know, my dear, that phrase,” and Lady Henge struck it out demonstratively from the piano near which she stood; “that phrase does sound a little weak.” Weak! Camelia could have capped the criticism very pungently. With a good deal of disgust at a situation which had so neatly turned the tables upon her, she said, “Mr. Perior may tell you so; I really can’t.” Her fate evidently was to support Lady Henge by a fraternity in inferior taste; and to be branded with inferior taste, even in Lady Henge’s eyes, was certainly rather galling. She had not bargained for it at all, nor dreamed that Lady Henge’s complacency would go down like a ninepin before Perior’s brutal missile. Her little perjury had not been in the least worth while.
Perior, having the grace to look somewhat embarrassed, arrived next morning with an impressive roll of music, and Camelia laughed, with some acidity it must be confessed, as she heard in the drawing-room the convincing energy of his demonstrations. Fragments of the poor poème symphonique, panting from their cruel dissection, reached her ears while she strolled about the lawns with Sir Arthur.
She foresaw that Lady Henge would prove a humble convert, and that she herself, if not to be convicted of gross insincerity, must remain gibbeted in a stubborn unconversion.
“Your mother is very patient,” she said, as, from the distant piano, the dogged repetition of a phrase emphasized its feeble absurdity. “Mr. Perior as mentor is in his element.”
Sir Arthur laughed with a good-humored recollection of his own political rebuff at Perior’s hands.
“He is uncompromisingly honest. If you ask for his advice he’ll give it to you.”