VII.
EVERY one noticed how beautifully it worked; the way, as Fred Landers said, she and Anne had hit it off from their first look at each other on the deck of the steamer.
Enid Drover was almost emotional about it, one evening when she and Kate sat alone in the Clephane drawing-room. It was after one of Anne’s “young” dinners, and the other guests, with Anne herself, had been whirled off to some form of midnight entertainment.
“It’s wonderful, my dear, how you’ve done it. Poor mother didn’t always find Anne easy, you know. But she’s taken a tremendous fancy to you.”
Kate felt herself redden with pride. “I suppose it’s the novelty, partly,” Mrs. Drover continued, with her heavy-stepping simplicity. “Perhaps that’s an advantage, in a way.” But she pulled up, apparently feeling that, in some obscure manner, she might be offending where she sought to please. “Anne admires your looks so much, you know; and your slightness.” A sigh came from her adipose depths. “I do believe it gives one more hold over one’s girls to have kept one’s figure. One can at least go on wearing the kind of clothes they like.”
Kate felt an inward glow of satisfaction. The irony of the situation hardly touched her: the fact that the youth and elasticity she had clung to so desperately should prove one of the chief assets of her new venture. It was beginning to seem natural that everything should lead up to Anne.
“This business of setting up a studio, now; Anne’s so pleased that you approve. She had a struggle with her grandmother about it; but poor mother wouldn’t give in. She was too horrified. She thought paint so messy—and then how could she have got up all those stairs?”
“Ah, well”—it was so easy to be generous!—“that sort of thing did seem horrifying to Mrs. Clephane’s generation. After all, it was not so long before her day that Dr. Johnson said portrait-painting was indelicate in a female.”
Mrs. Drover gave her sister-in-law a puzzled look. Her mind seldom retained more than one word in any sentence, and her answer was based on the reaction that particular word provoked. “Female—” she murmured—“is that word being used again? I never thought it very nice to apply it to women, did you? I suppose I’m old-fashioned. Nothing shocks the young people nowadays—not even the Bible.”
Nothing could have given Kate Clephane greater confidence in her own success than this little talk with Enid Drover. She had been feeling her way so patiently, so stealthily almost, among the out-works and defences of her daughter’s character; and here she was actually instated in the citadel.