“Do explain why.”
“It’s so dreary; they’re so deadly serious. Do people really fall in love as mournfully as that? I prefer to do it more gaily.”
“Everyone falls in love in the same key as they do other things,” said she. “Tristan and Isolde weren’t gay.”
“No, not exactly what one ordinarily means by it. But most people in operas would be terribly depressing to live with. Think of living with all those beggars in the Ring. Awful! Perhaps I had better go and dress, if I’m going to begin the day. Lord! It’s after eleven. I say, mother, you’ve had your Italian stainer and polisher, haven’t you? But you’re not so red as he’s stained you, are you?”
Lady Grote smoothed her hand over her new Titian hair, rather piqued.
“Yes, darling,” she said, “it’s been exactly like that for three days, and this is the first time you’ve been kind enough to notice your poor old mother.”
Robin giggled.
“Badders saw,” he said. “He told me you had the most wonderful coloured hair of any girl—he did say ‘girl’—he’d ever seen, except one. Lucky for you I hadn’t noticed it before, or I should have had to tell Badders all about the stainer. Wasn’t he funny when he came into your room at Grote one Sunday morning, and I thought he was the undertaker? I shall tell Badders about him.”
“You are a very rude, disagreeable sort of boy,” said Lady Grote. “And who was the one girl, I think you said, who was more decorative than me?”
“I forget. One of Badders’s. Shall I see you again before I go to Cambridge?”