"It will be very brilliant," said her husband, solemnly.
Jim Armine rose to go.
"You will be here to-night?" asked Eva. "We don't begin till eleven."
"The heat is getting very oppressive," said Lord Hayes, politely, as he opened the door for him. "The thermometer was standing at eighty-two degrees in the Window of White's."
Eva was sitting back in her chair, in an attitude that was common with her, with her two hands clasped over one knee. She had developed a great power of doing nothing; whether it was a survival of the days of the blank white page, or an effect of the change that had given her so much to think about, is doubtful; probably the habit of the first was adapted to the needs of the second. Life was interesting and amusing—a new book in a new language. She had found herself suddenly transplanted from a silent, pleasant garden to a crowded reception-hall. Her tastes did not lie in the direction of gardens; they seemed to her very monotonous. The beautiful but silent and weary-looking girl, who had been looked at and passed by, found London a different place when she learned that the rows of eyes in the reception-room looked to her as a sort of center. There is nothing so inexplicable as the phenomenon called "the rage." The opera screamed and starved unheard for years in London, when suddenly the whole of London became aware that it was the most delicious thing in the world. It had been there all the time; it was advertised in the morning papers, but nobody cared. In the same way with Eva—she was living before, and she was living after; she had been advertised at balls and concerts, but the advertisement had been entirely unremunerative. Then a middle-aged peer had remarked that Miss Grampound seemed to him worthy of the highest compliment that a man can pay a woman, with the consequence that all London was of one mind that she was exactly what they had been looking for so long. Eva's head was not turned, nor was her heart touched, but the effect was that she became conscious of herself, and conscious of other people. Pygmalion had touched Galatea and Galatea sprang to life.
Pygmalion inevitably has the worst of it. When a whole race of men bursts almost simultaneously on one woman, it is not to be expected that she will single out one. They are all queer and interesting, some are attractive. Poor little Pygmalion may beat his breast in the corner and say, "It is mine, it is all mine," but no one will listen to him; least of all Galatea. His best course is to keep on good terms with his handiwork, and be very polite and obliging. He is compelled to act as bear-leader to this incarnated stone, but he had better not allude to the time when he called her off her pedestal; and unless he is a fool, he will not try to put any finishing stroke to his handiwork. He let her have a soul, let him remember that he did not let her have it. The material is his, her flesh and blood, for he paid for it when it came from the quarries, but his possession ends there. The rest is hers and all the world's.
Lord Hayes sat down again on the chair he had just left, and repeated his remark about the thermometer at White's. Eva stifled a yawn.
"I suppose that was in the shade, was it not?"
"Oh, yes," he said; "in the sun the temperature would have been much higher."
"Your mother and I had a somewhat plain-spoken conversation this afternoon," she said; "I came in for a good deal of abuse."