“But you are not planning to neglect us entirely! Cutter would not stand for that. You will be coming up occasionally, of course,” he insisted, smiling.
“No; this is my home.”
Gad, couldn’t she even squirm a bit? Why didn’t she blaze forth at Cutter or cover the situation with a few lies? He wondered how it would feel to live with a woman who hit the truth on the head every time, as if the truth was a nail to be driven in, even if it pierced your vitals.
Shippen swept a complimentary glance around the room as if in reply to her last remark. “Well, you have certainly made it a beautiful home,” he said, feeling by the growing emergency of the question in her eyes that if he did not get off on another tack, she might force an explanation of his presence here which he was not ready to make until he had won more of her confidence. “This room is marvelous,” he went on, “sedate and feminine. It escapes the austerity of being a noble room by a miracle. What is it? Piety with a flash of color, I should say. However did you think of such an effect? And how did you accomplish it?”
“I did not do it. I have learned something,” she said, off her guard for the first time, following his eyes about this room as if she accompanied his thoughts.
“What have you learned?” he asked, smiling.
“To buy what I want—not mere things, but taste in the choice of these things. It is for sale, like any other commodity.”
He laughed, with an appreciative glint of the eye.
“For so long I did not know that taste is the one thing most people have not got. They only look as if they had it, when in fact they have purchased it. You buy it from your tailor. The woman whose clothes please you pays the modiste who makes them much more for her taste than for her work. You can buy any kind of taste, good, bad or indifferent; but nearly everybody buys it.”
What she said was not interesting; but he was interested that she could think it; it showed that she had a mind, which he had doubted. He hoped she would not develop too much along this line. The perfect woman, in his opinion, should have loveliness, health, and only a rudimentary intelligence. He was very tired, indeed, of the rhinestone sparkle of feminine wit.