“Not in the least!” said Mabel, brightly. All the married women she knew told her that men hated tired women. “How interesting you have made our salon, darling. Mother, can you imagine how we were ever satisfied with just smart people before?”
Mrs. Cutting shrugged her shoulders, but smiled indulgently. “We never receive those people in New York, but no doubt we make a great mistake. Genius ought to be recognized, and when artists and others are quite convenable, I certainly think they should be encouraged to remain so. Besides, it helps them to meet patrons.”
Ordham concealed a smile and replied gently, “I feel greatly honoured that they should come to my house.” Mrs. Cutting noted with some amusement that he characteristically assumed that this splendid mansion, leased, furnished, and supported by the Cutting millions, was his own. But, although she too had some time since discovered that she knew him very little, she liked him too well to feel more than a passing irritation. In her own way she was in love with him, as mothers often are with a charming young man come suddenly into the family as the husband of an idolized child. It is the only opportunity a woman has to love a man with a passion that is not legitimately sexual or maternal, but a little of both, boned of both danger and responsibilities.
“I might point out,” continued Ordham, “that we are not the first to receive the great in art, although, naturally, they prefer their own circles. But even this absurd æsthetic movement has been of service to London society, for it has popularized art, at least, and permanently banished antimacassars. It only remains for some culinary genius to follow in their track to make England almost as inhabitable as Paris or Italy.”
“Don’t you love your country, Jackie darling?” asked Mabel, wistfully.
“Of course. But I was born, remember, when the Brotherhood, unknown to the herd, was commanding the attention of the elect, and of these my mother aspired to be. Naturally I became imbued with a love of change as well as of beauty; quite as naturally I find it necessary to gratify both out of England.”
“It is odd that you should be so different from your brothers,” interposed Mrs. Cutting, hastily.
“Oh, they are all reversions to the ancestral type, Ordhams from marrow to skin. My father did not like artists, and in time, my mother, being a dutiful wife, got her gowns from Worth until he died, although permitted to invite Rossetti and a few others to her big parties. And she had much political entertaining, political work generally, to do; she had little leisure to cultivate that side of London.”
“Well, I am rather glad she has followed her natural bent since,” said Mrs. Cutting, pleasantly. “Those nice Burne-Jones gowns she wears—or are they Rossettis? Frankly, I can’t tell the pictures of one from the other, except that Burne-Jones’s women seem to be longer and thinner, particularly as to neck. I wonder what beauty Rossetti could have found in incipient goitres.”
Ordham got up suddenly and lit a cigarette some distance away. Less than a week since he had received a letter from Count Kilchberg, in which that gentleman, innocently regaling him with the gossip of Munich, mentioned that Frau von Wass had no goitre, had been shut up by her husband, suddenly jealous of somebody, no one could discover whom. The story ran that the Nachmeister had opened the eyes of the Herr Geheimrath in order to save some friend of her own from the clutches of the fair Hélène. No key was necessary for Ordham, and his conscience had given him a bad hour, although it was with a pleasant sense of relief that he realized he could do nothing. He had accordingly locked up the memory again, and was irritated with his mother-in-law for liberating it. But when he turned, he said carelessly: