“One can always play to a true lover of music,” murmured Nina. “I often feel that with little Francie—child though she is.”
“Mrs. Grantham was so very musical, poor thing!” ejaculated Lady Argent, who would have felt it almost an irreverence to omit the epithet in the case of one deceased. “It is a pity the girls have not inherited her gift. They neither of them play, do they, or is Rosamund musical?”
“Not in the very least,” replied Nina, who rather disliked Rosamund. “She does not know the meaning of the word. Between ourselves, dear Lady Argent, Rosamund is not a very taking sort of girl, although she’s prettier than Frances—in fact,” she added, with the easy generosity of an extremely and maturely attractive woman, “she is quite unusually pretty. But that’s all.”
“I thought she was clever.”
Nina shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s not the sort of cleverness that attracts,” she said shrewdly. “Hazel Tregaskis, before she married, had twice the success that Rosamund had. Now, of course, with money and clothes and things, and that romantic story about her marriage, Hazel is too popular for words, though she’s really not pretty in the least—only very bright and attractive.”
Lady Argent, who did not think that Hazel Tregaskis’s marriage with Sir Guy Marleswood was a sufficiently reputable subject to be mentioned, except to the Almighty, with whom she occasionally pleaded piously for the first Lady Marleswood’s demise, maintained a rather weighty silence.
Nina rippled lightly through it.
“Rosamund is rather the sort of girl who likes to go about looking like a tragedy-queen, and for no particular reason, you know. There was a very foolish and youthful love affair,” said Nina with an air of extreme detachment, “which only lasted about a week, and meant nothing at all, but she has quite got over that—so that her air of having a grievance is really affectation. You know anything which fails to ring quite true does jar so—one feels it instinctively—in a moment. Don’t you agree?”
Lady Argent looked as though she were torn between truth and an unaccountable desire to contradict her visitor, and it was a slight but distinct relief to them both when Ludovic came into the room.