"Bagheera was warm-blooded; there was truth and affection in him—for Mowgli, at all events. Your friend di Valdo is as cold a proposition as you could find."
Nina thought this last characterization absurd, and said so.
"All right!" Porter answered. "You mark my word. He is a man swayed by the emotions of the moment. He has feeling, yes—but no heart; he has certain inborn principles, but they are racial rather than ethical. His is the code of Noblesse oblige, not of the Golden Rule. In a point of honor he is irreproachable, but it is he, himself, who defines the boundaries of his code."
He paused a moment and continued in a more personal tone: "I don't know you very well, Miss Randolph, but you are a girl from home. And—excuse my frankness—you are one of our great heiresses. I am a stranger to you, and that is why I am going to say something—perhaps all the more forcefully because I have only a racial and not a personal interest: but between marrying Giovanni Sansevero—or that Austrian over yonder—or the golden-headed ornament on your right, and such a man as John Derby, no woman with an ounce of sense could for one minute hesitate. The first, by the gift of kings, are noblemen, but John over there, by the grace of God, is a man!"
Nina was so deeply stirred by his words that she sat for a little while quite motionless, looking down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap. Then, before she either looked up or answered, the women left the table.
In the drawing-room, as the other women lighted their cigarettes, Nina stood leaning her cheek on her hand as it rested against the mantel—and for some time she gazed down into the fire, while Porter's words echoed and reëchoed through her mind. When she turned away from the fire her attention was caught by an Englishwoman who had thrown herself full length on the sofa. Her person was a curious mixture of cleanliness and untidiness, her face was even polished by soap and scrubbing, but her frock, although probably quite clean, looked anything but fresh, and lying down among the cushions had not improved her hair, which had been frowzily frizzed anyway. Nina would have thought Lady Dorothy an impossible person were it not for the "Lady" which, as Carpazzi put it, "was pushed before the name."
In the meanwhile Lady Dorothy went off into a long disquisition upon the advisability of having couches at formal banquets as in the old Roman days. The illustration which she was at the moment affording was scarcely, to Nina's mind, encouraging to her proposition. She smoked rapidly and let the cigarette ashes spill all down the side of her neck.
"Isn't it funny what a little place the world is?" babbled the late Miss Titherington, cutting short Lady Dorothy's discourse. "Here we are, you and I and John—just the same as though we were back in Bar Harbor! What a lamb of a child you used to be! Only do you remember the day you nearly drowned me? And he had to rescue us both!"
"Just fancy that!" said the Lady Dorothy from her corner of the sofa. "However did it happen?"
"The water in Maine is so cold one dare hardly go in. Nina was a little girl, she got a cramp, and clutched me around the neck."