She stood looking at her with frank, surrendered gaze; a little dazzled, as she always was, with such easy unconscious splendour. She regarded Nellie, if she could have put her appreciation into words, as she might have regarded some golden casket, set with gems, which seemed to have been laid in her hands. She had, as yet, no idea what was inside it; she had not attempted to raise the lid. It was enough at present to be allowed to hold it in shy, adoring fingers.
“No, nothing,” said Nellie; “not even to sit down. I came, in fact, to make you stand up.”
“I’m doing that,” said Silvia.
“That’s not enough.... My dear, what a delicious frock! But my horrible Philip has been obliged to go out of town, and I’m at a loose end till dinner, and thought it would be wonderfully pleasant to sit on the grass somewhere. Isn’t that original? At the moment when that rural idea occurred to me, I passed your gilded portals and thought it would be even more wonderful if you came and sat there too. I don’t mean ordinary, dirty grass, but clean grass. Richmond Park, or something. Top of a bus, of course. Old hats.”
There could have been no more attractive notion to Silvia. She felt that it was just that she had long been wanting; namely, to be with Nellie on the grass in an old hat. She could still ecstatically be dazzled, could follow the beam of the lighthouse with steady rapture; but a fresh aspect of her, away from ball-rooms and crowds, just that old-hat aspect, she felt at once to be what most she desired. She might, it is true, be just as dazzling thus, she might, indeed, be more dazzling when other lesser brightnesses were withdrawn from her vicinity; but however she turned out, she could not fail to show a new enchantment.
“Of course I’ll come,” she said. “Let me go and get an old hat. You don’t want me, mother, do you?”
“No, dear. But if you’ll ring the bell, I’ll order the car for you. Far more comfortable and far quicker than the top of a bus.”
Nellie had been taking in the appurtenances of this room, to which she had not previously penetrated, with those quick, bird-like glances which were away again, scarcely alighting, before you knew they had perched at all. Mrs. Wardour’s hospitable suggestion seemed to contrast with her own project in just the manner in which those creaking cretonne chairs contrasted with the brocade on the walls and the Aubusson on the floor.
“Ah, how kind,” she said; “but, dear Mrs. Wardour, the point of our expedition is not to be comfortable and quick, but uncomfortable and slow. I yearn for that, and for being rustic and common. Otherwise, I should ask you to lend me one of those glorious chairs and let me sit and look at Buckingham Palace.”
“Yes, you can see it out of the window,” said Mrs. Wardour. “But the top of a bus—let me see, Miss Heaton, isn’t it—is the top of a bus quite the thing for girls like Silvia and you?”