Lady Jane didn't seem at all overjoyed to see Barty, but Julia did, and did not disguise the seeming.
There were eight or ten people there, and they all appeared to know about him, and all that concerned or belonged to him. It was the old London world over again, in little! the same tittle‑tattle about well‑known people, and nothing else—as if nothing else existed; a genial, easy‑going, good‑natured world, that he had so often found charming for a time, but in which he was never quite happy and had no proper place of his own, all through that fatal bar‑sinister—la barre de bâtardise; a world that was his and yet not his, and in whose midst his position was a false one, but where every one took him for granted at once as one of them, so long as he never trespassed beyond that sufferance; that there must be no love‑making to lovely young heiresses by the bastard of Antoinette Josselin was taken for granted also!
Before Barty had been there half an hour two or three
"'YOU ASK ME WHY I LOOK SO PALE?'"
people had evidently lost their hearts to him in friendship; among them, to Lady Jane's great discomfiture, the handsome and amiable Graham‑Reece, the cynosure of all female eyes in Riffrath; and when Barty (after very little pressing by Miss Royce) twanged her guitar and sang little songs—French and English, funny and sentimental—he became, as he had so often become in other scenes, the Rigoletto of the company; and Riffrath was a kingdom in which he might be court jester in ordinary if he chose, whenever he elected to honor it with his gracious and facetious musical presence.
So much for his début in that strange little overgrown busy village! What must it be like now?
Dr. Hasenclever has been gathered to his fathers long ago, and nobody that I know of has taken his place. All those new hotels and lodging‑houses and smart shops—what can they have been turned into? Barracks? prisons? military hospitals and sanatoriums? How dull!
Lady Caroline and Daphne and Barty between them added considerably to the gayety of Düsseldorf that summer—especially when Royces and Reeces and Duffs and such like people came there from Riffrath to lunch, or tea, or dinner, or for walks or drives or rides to Grafenberg or Neanderthal, or steamboatings to Neuss.