Conkling showed his surprise.
“It’ll take time, of course, to go over a bunch like that.”
“That,” said Georgina Keswick with an air of escape, “is why I should prefer making an appointment for some other day.”
“It all depends on the pictures, of course, just how long it’ll take me.”
“I don’t think you’ll find them altogether trivial.”
He recalled the earlier allusion to old masters. But he had had experience with the bucolic conception of such things.
“Who are the artists?” he asked in his most matter-of-fact tone.
“I’m not sure,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “At least, not sure of all of them.”
“But the ones you know?” he prompted. And again a period of silence reigned in the shadowy room before she spoke.
“There’s a Decamps and two Corots and a Holbein,” she said very quietly. “There is also a Constable—no, two Constables—and one Boldini, and what we were once led to believe was a copy of Correggio, though our late rector, who was in both Rome and Florence once, remained strongly persuaded that it was an original.”