“You haven’t changed a bit,” he bantered. “I’m sorry your eyesight is not so good as it was. Studio life is pretty tough on the eyes, isn’t it?”
She closed her lorgnette with a snap, and turned to the girl.
“You’d better see what Sir John is doing,” she said. “Ask him what he thinks I am, that I should wait in the hall like a tramp.”
It was then that the girl came out of the shadow and Timothy saw her.
“This is the ward or niece,” he said to himself, and sighed, for never had he seen a human creature who so satisfied his eye. There is a beauty which is neither statuesque nor cold, nor to be confounded with prettiness. It is a beauty which depends upon no regularity of feature or of colour, but which has its reason in its contradictions.
The smiling Madonna whom Leonardo drew had such contradictory quality as this girl possessed. For she was ninety per cent. child, and carried in her face all the bubbling joy of youth. Yet she impressed Timothy as being strange and unnatural. Her meekness, her ready obedience to carry out the woman’s instruction, the very dignity of her departure—these things did not fit with the character he read in her face. Had she turned curtly to this insolent woman and told her to carry her message herself, or had she flown up the stairs calling for Sir John as she went, these things would have been natural.
Lady Maxell turned upon him.
“And see here, Mr. What’s-your-name, if you’re a friend of Sir John, you’ll forget that I was ever in a studio. There are enough stories about me in Bournemouth without your adding to the collection.”
“Mother’s little thoroughbred!” said Timothy admiringly; “spoken like a true little lady.”
In some respects he was wholly undisciplined, and had never learnt the necessity of refraining from answering back. And the woman irritated him, and irritation was a novel sensation.