Jennie saw how Bob could have come by words like "polygamous" and "monogamous." People at Marillo Park spoke a language of their own—"English with frills on it," was the way she put it to herself. From the intonation, she was able to frame her answer in the negative, while, once more, the superb eyes, which were oddly like Bob's little steely ones, were lifted on her with a smile.
"You know, I should think people would be crazy to paint you. How do you like your tea? Sugar? Cream? One lump? Two lumps?" Having flung out answers at random, Jennie leaned forward to take her cup, while the kindly voice ran on: "Just as you sit there you're a picture. Funny I should have given you a tan-colored cushion, because it tones in exactly."
Jennie explained that the various shades of brown and some of the deeper ones of red were among her favorites.
"Because they go so well with your hair," her hostess said, comprehendingly, and studying her now more frankly. "My dear, you've got the most lovely hair! It isn't auburn; it isn't coppery; it isn't red. It's—what is it? Oh, I see! It's amber—it's the extraordinary shade Romney gets into some of his portraits of Lady Hamilton. You see it in the one in the Frick gallery, if I remember rightly. You must look the next time you're there."
Jennie tried to stammer that she would, only that her syllables ran into one another and became incoherent.
"But Romney couldn't paint you," Mrs. Collingham declared, enthusiastically, putting her cup to her lips. "He's too Georgian. You're the twentieth century. You're the perfect spirit of the age—restless, rebellious, wistful, and delicate all at once. Girls nowadays remind me of exquisite fragile things like the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, only built of steel. You've got the steel look—all slender and unbendable. It's curious that—the way women look like the ages in which they're born. You've only to go through a portrait collection to see that it's so. Take the Stuart women, for instance—the Vandyke and Lely women—great saucer-eyed things, with sensual lips and breasts. And then the Holbein women, so terribly got up in their stiff Sunday clothes, which they must have hurried to put into their cedar chests the minute they got home from mass. But they belong to their time, don't you think?"
Jennie could only say she did think, vowing in her heart that the next day would see her going round the Metropolitan Museum with a catalogue.
"But you! Hubert Wray says he's done a wonderful study of you, and I'm crazy to see it. The only thing I don't like from his description is that he's got you in a Greek dress and attitude, and I think, now that I've seen you, that the day after to-morrow is your style. What do you say yourself?"
"I don't know about the day after to-morrow; I'm so busy with to-day."
Mrs. Collingham took this with a pleasant little laugh.