“Nice, dear little creature, that,” said Mayburn, “though she does so dislike me. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I never quite know how far her Anglicanism goes; such a pity that it doesn’t go a little further and carry her into a nunnery of the Catholic Church. She is the nun type. She ought to be done up in their delicious costume; it would lend her the flavor she lacks so distressingly now. Did you notice her collar and her hair? Astonishing the way that Eppie makes use of all these funny, guindée creatures whom she gets hold of down here. Have you ever seen Miss Grey?—dogmatic, utilitarian, strangely ugly Miss Grey, another nun type corrupted by our silly modern conditions. She reeks of Comte and looks like a don. And all the rest of them,—the solemn humanitarians, the frothy socialists, the worldly, benign old ecclesiastics,—Eppie works them all; she has a genius for administration. It’s an art in her. It almost consoles one for seeing her wasted down here for so much of the year.”
“Why wasted?” Gavan queried. “She enjoys it.”
“Exactly. That’s the alleviation. Wasted for us, I mean. You have known her for a long time, haven’t you, Palairet?”
Gavan, irked by the question and by the familiarity of Mayburn’s references to their absent hostess, answered dryly that he had known Miss Gifford since childhood; and Mayburn, all tact, passed at once to less personal topics, inquiring with a new earnestness whether Palairet had seen Selby’s Goya, and expatiating on its exquisite horror until the turning of a key in the hall-door, quick steps on the stairs leading up past the sitting-room, announced Eppie’s arrival.
She was with them in a moment, cap and jacket doffed, her muddy shoes changed for slender patent-leather, fresh in her white blouse. She greeted Mayburn, turning to Gavan with, “I’m so glad you waited. You shall both have tea directly.”
With all her crisp kindliness, Gavan fancied a change in her since the greeting of an hour and a half before. Things hadn’t gone well with her. And he could flatter himself, also, with the suspicion that she was vexed at finding their tête-à-tête interrupted.
Mayburn loitered about the room after her while she straightened the shade on the student’s lamp, just brought in, and made the tea, telling her about people, about what was going on in the only world that counted, telling her about Chrissie Bentworth’s astounding elopement, and, finally, about the Goya. “You really must see it soon,” he assured her.
Eppie, adjusting the flame of her kettle, said that she didn’t want to see it.
“You don’t care for Goya, dear lady?”
“Not just now.”