“I’m just telling you that Frances is the only one of the two who has any music in her. Rosamund is absolutely devoid of it. If you had any spark of the Divine Fire in you, my dear boy, you could not have helped recognizing it in little Frances, even though she can hardly play a note. But, after all, one doesn’t expect much perception from youth.”
She murmured the last words as though to herself, which added considerably to their effect.
Morris, who was seldom able to think of any satisfactory repartee to his mother’s favourite gibe, hastily decided that a good-humoured indifference would best refute it. He gave a slight laugh, shrugged his shoulders so as to make quite sure that Nina did not miss the point of the laugh, and observed lightly:
“I hear Hazel Tregaskis sings delightfully. She always was good, even as a kid.”
“Quite good,” agreed Nina, with that air of condescension best calculated to irritate her son. “Her voice is a charming one, but, of course, she has to live before she can really sing.” She hesitated for an instant, since the obvious slighting allusion to youth could hardly be brought in without some appearance of repeating a good effect ad nauseam.
Morris, with his usual fatal perception, instantly took advantage of her slightly disconcerted pause, for which he perfectly grasped the reason, to say pleasantly: “I shall be able to judge when I hear her.” Upon which, having established his own perfect competence to form an independent opinion, he hastily left the room.
That night they went to dinner at Porthlew, and he heard Hazel Tregaskis sing.
Her voice, as Nina had said, was charming, and she played her own accompaniments.
Nina sat well in the lamplight, an absorbed, dreamy look on her face, and her long, slight fingers slowly twisting her wedding ring, with a gesture which through long years of conscious pathos, had become habitual to her. Frederick Tregaskis, smaller and more wizened than ever, was frankly asleep in an armchair. His wife, devotedly knitting socks, yet contrived to present an attitude of critical intentness for her daughter’s performance.
Frances was sitting at the open window, her pure, vague gaze fixed unseeingly on the darkened garden without. Morris scarcely glanced at her a moment.