“I thought it was, but I couldn’t be sure. Lord, what a set out! But those two are having such a good time. I hadn’t the heart to make them sit up. And I daresay they’ve got a lot of men in the House of Lords not half so honest as Eddie.”
“I should never have forgiven you, Uncle Alf,” said she, “if you’d vexed them.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t, then,” said he. “And what’s going to happen now? You don’t mean to say Mrs. Per’s going to sing?”
It appeared that this was the case. Naturally she required a certain amount of pressing, not because she had any intention of not singing but because a little diffidence, a little fear that she had been naughty, and hadn’t sung for weeks, was the correct thing.
Uncle Alfred heard this latter remark.
“She’s been practising every day. Per told us in the dining room,” he said. “Lord, if Sabincourt would paint her as she looks when she sings I’d give him his price for it. That woman will give me the indigestion if I let my mind dwell on her.”
Mrs. Per sang with a great deal of expression such simple songs as did not want much else. Indeed, her rendering of “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be cle-he-ver,” was chiefly expression. There was a great deal of expression, too, in the concluding line, which she sang with her eyes on the ceiling and a rapt smile playing about her tight little mouth. “One lorng sweet sorng,” she sang on a quavering and throaty F: “One lorng sweet sorng.” And she touched the last chord with the soft pedal down and continued smiling for several seconds, with that “lost look,” as Per described it, “that Lizzie gets when she is singing.”
Her mother-in-law broke the silence.
“If that isn’t nice!” she said. “And I declare if I know whether I like the words or the music best. One seems to fit the other so. Lizzie, my dear, you’re going to give us another, won’t you now?”
Lizzie had every intention of doing so, but again a little pressing was necessary, and she finally promised to sing once more, just once, if Claude would “do” something afterward. So she ran her hands over the keys, and became light and frolicsome, and sang something about a shower and a maid and a little kissing, which was very pretty and winsome. After that she sang again and again.