“Do! do!” she urged heartily. “I’m crazy to see something you’ve painted.”
“You won’t care for my painting,” he pronounced without hesitation; “but the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older than this.”
They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large illustrated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in undertones.
“The bird which you see,” the abbé was saying, “with the smaller birds crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church.”
“It’s not true, though, that the pelican does that,” Estelle was on the point of saying with American freedom, “any more than that a scorpion surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a lot of old superstitions were exploded.” But she tactfully did nothing of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.
What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.
“I feel as if I had lost a key!” said Miss Seymour, and looked like a bewildered princess turned old by a wicked 174fairy’s spell. “When I possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I didn’t know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it’s gone, I know the value of that little golden key.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. “There’s no use in us women pretending we don’t mind! Those who really and truly don’t must be great philosophers or great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer even than philosophy....”
Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond, where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.
He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel. The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel stood there was still light enough to see by.