As Ordham was escorted through the immense entrance hall and up to the reception room at the head of the grand staircase, then left where he could command a long vista, he felt as if he had entered an enchanted palace. He had been in many palaces, many fine mansions, but never before where the wise gift of selection had eliminated the haphazard accumulations of the centuries, and appropriated all that was beautiful and artistic in historic houses whose owners could no longer pay their monthly bills. He knew what this wondrous interior meant to countless impoverished families whose ancestors had dazzled France. It was the most complete demonstration of the power of practically unlimited wealth that he had ever witnessed, and he wondered if rich Americans really appreciated their good fortune, or if they took it as a matter of course from the moment they were laid in their golden cradle; he was sure that American royalties, unlike European, would never condescend to use merely gilded cradles.
Down at one end of the long vista he saw Mabel Cutting approaching. He rose, but stood still for a moment, hoping that she had not yet seen him, and curious to discover what his first impression of her would be after these eventful months of separation. Moreover, he felt suddenly nervous.
His only impression at the moment was that the figure moving toward him down the bright formal French rooms, was the most graceful he had ever seen. Styr walked like a goddess. Mabel Cutting had the exquisite unconscious grace of a highly bred young girl, a grace that suggests a complete independence of the gravity of the earth. She walked as lightly as if she had never thought about walking at all; her slender figure had none of the conscious upstanding dignity of maturity; it was almost somnambulistic, an effect in harmony with her dreamy large eyes. She wore a gown and hat of various shades of green, and looked like spring reappearing for a moment to reproach the excesses of summer. And she was far more beautiful than when he had seen her last. Oh, no doubt of that. Beside her trotted LaLa, looking like a gnome.
Ordham stood spellbound before this vision for a moment; then advanced with even more dignity than usual, that she might not detect his tremors. Miss Cutting smiled pleasantly and offered her hand.
“How do you do, Mr. Ordham?” Her voice was light, sweet, cold, undeveloped. “Mother will be down presently and give you a cup of tea. Shall we sit in here? It is not so formal.”
She preceded him into a large room, which assuredly, thought he, must have been lifted bodily from some unfortunate royal chateau; but he was far more interested in the graceful figure before him, in her cool ease of manner. Where was the chatterbox of six months since? As they seated themselves beside the tea-table she politely but a little absently asked him if he was glad to be in England again after so long a sojourn abroad; then, her curiosity apparently satisfied, left the conversation in his keeping. He was searching his mind for a new subject to avert an awkward pause, wondering if the great absent eyes fixed upon him gave heed to his unprecedented exertions, and growing vaguely angry, when Mrs. Cutting came brightly in. She shook him warmly by the hand, and prepared to pour out tea with a smiling alertness that made her daughter appear the more indifferent by contrast. As Mrs. Cutting ran on, indeed, Mabel seemed to withdraw more and more into herself, and even while drinking her tea gave the impression of performing a polite act in which she took no interest. At all events she made no attempt to enter the conversation, which, for a time, was all of Ordham’s examinations and future. Once or twice he sought her eyes in the suddenly remembered fashion of that fortnight in Munich when they flirted behind “Momma’s” back; but in vain. Mrs. Cutting was no longer Momma and Mabel was no longer Mabel. What was she? Being a mere man, it was incomprehensible to him that even a London season and many admirers, to say nothing of tutors and books, could transform a beautiful but decidedly commonplace child into a wondrous creature with the poise of her mother, the mystery of those maidens the poets invoke from cloudland, and the intellectual abstraction of a budding genius. She was so perfectfully beautiful, so provocative in her abstraction, that he was at first merely interested. But at the end of half an hour, when she had not addressed a remark to him, but had sat as if she were in front of a camera, he began to grow really angry. He was not accustomed to disdain. He was quite aware that if not yet the head of his family, he was more than a match for any American girl, and had received something more than encouragement from the young lady’s mamma. Moreover, and here he sat up suddenly and began talking with animation to Mrs. Cutting, was he not the intimate friend of one of the greatest women in the world? For the first time he felt the flattery of the haughty Styr’s selection, and in the present engagement it gave him a distinct moral advantage that almost visibly uplifted his chest. He had permitted Mrs. Cutting to sustain the conversation before; he now turned to her wholly, and, the talk having drifted to Munich, gave her a brilliant description of Styr’s Isolde, which should at least display to this absurd young person his knowledge of the art which had lured her to London in the heats of August.
“It is the disappointment of my life that I have not seen Styr,” said Mrs. Cutting. “She did not sing while I was in Munich, and I have never been to Bayreuth. To be frank, I care little for Wagner. When one has been brought up on Patti and Nilsson, so to speak,—”
“Mother!”
Ordham turned with a start. Miss Cutting was regarding her mother with eyes sparkling disapproval. She moved them to Ordham, and the access of interest in those profound orbs was unmistakable. “Thank heaven I am not old-fashioned!” Her voice was so sweet, almost plaintive, that even an American mother could not feel snubbed. “What little I have heard of Wagner—almost wholly at orchestral concerts here—makes me long to hear more—all. Perhaps my English teacher infected me with his own enthusiasm. And he, too, has heard the great Styr. Is it true, Mr. Ordham, that you have heard her in all her rôles?”
“Oh, many times.”