“I don’t believe a woman ever existed who was so obviously admirable,” he said. “We went to the opera together the night before I came up here, and as she was going on to some large ball afterwards, she was—well, suitably dressed.”
Maud felt, as she always felt when Thurso talked like this, as if a file had been drawn across her teeth. She tried to turn, not the conversation, but its tone.
“Oh, how?” she asked, with deep and genuine interest; for, like all sensible girls, she loved beautiful clothes, especially when beautiful people wore them. “She always makes everybody else look dowdy or overdressed. That must be such fun.”
“Well, she had the diamond palisade, as she calls it, in her hair, and what she calls the ruby plaster all, all down her.”
“Yes, but her dress?” said Maud. “I know the plaster.”
“Her dress? Goodness knows what it was made of, but it looked—you know what whipped cream looks like compared to cream—it looked like whipped gold. Sort of froth of gold: not yellow, but gold. Melba was in the middle of the jewel-song when we came in, but at the end of it nobody was paying the slightest attention to her. Every glass in the house was turned on Catherine.”
He got up and threw his cigarette-end away.
“And she’s my wife,” he added; and the four words carried tons of irony.
Maud got up also. She hated this: it was the process of the file again. She knew that Thurso talked to no one but her like that, but she deplored that he felt like that.
“Oh, it is such a pity, dear,” she said.