But just as they finished the soup, to his intense relief, a ray of light seemed to pierce of a sudden the gathering gloom of the dinner table. The drawing-room door opened, and through its portal a Vision of Beauty in an evening dress floated, Hellenic goddess-wise, into the salle-à-manger. It made its way straight to the vacant chair, nodded and smiled recognition to the bread-and-butter gigglers and the Honourable Mrs Medway, bowed demurely, continental-way, to the newly come strangers, and glided off at once, without a pause or break, into a general flow all round of graceful, easy conversation. Florian gazed, and succumbed. This was a real live woman! Ripe, but not too ripe, soft and rounded of outline, with a bewitching mouth, a row of pearly teeth, and a cheek that wore only its own natural roses, she might have impressed at first sight a less susceptible heart by far than the epicurean sage’s. As she seated herself, she drew from her pocket a little cardboard box, which she handed with a charming smile to one of the giggling inarticulates. “Those are the set you admired, I think,” she said, with unconscious grace. “I hope I’ve got the right ones. I was passing the shop on my way back from my drive, and I thought I’d just drop in and bring them back as you liked them so.”
The giggling inarticulate gave a jerky little scream of unmixed delight as she opened the box and took out from it with tremulous hands a pretty set of coral necklet, brooch, and earrings. “Not for me!” she cried, gasping; “not for me—for a present! You don’t really mean to give them to me! They’re too lovely, too delicious!”
“Yes, I do,” the Vision of Beauty responded, beaming. “I wanted to give you some little souvenir some time before you went, and I didn’t know what you’d like; so, as you said you admired these, I thought I’d best go in at once as I passed and buy them. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Florian eyed them with the lenient glance of a man of taste who appraises and appreciates a beautiful woman’s selection. When the bread-and-butter gigglers had exhausted upon them their slender stock of laudatory adjectives—their oh’s and just look’s, and dear me, aren’t they beautiful’s—he broke in with his bland smile, and, laying the necklet in a curve on the white tablecloth before him, began to discourse with much unction in the Florianic tongue, on the æsthetic points of this pretty trifle. For it was a pretty necklet, there was no denying that; its lance-like pendants were delicately shaped and most gracefully arranged; it was one of those simple half-barbaric designs which retain to our day all the naïve beauty of primitive unsophisticated human workmanship. Florian found in it reminiscences of Eve in Eden. And he said so in that luxuriantly florid style of which he was so great and so practical a master. He called attention with suave tones to the distinctly precious suggestions of archaic influence in the shaping of the pendants; to the exquisite nature of coral as a decorative object, cast up blushing on our shores by the ungarnered sea—a material whose use we inherit from our innocent ancestors, when wild in woods the noble savage ran, his limbs untrammelled by clinging draperies—when beauty unadorned was adorned the most in the subtle and sinuous curves of its own lissome figure. Necklets and armlets, he observed, with one demonstrative white forefinger held poised above the salmon, are the string-courses, so to speak, of this our natural human architecture; they serve to emphasise and throw out into stronger relief the structural points of the grand design, to call attention to the exquisite native fulness of a faultless torso.
The giggling inarticulates dropped their chins and stared. They were not quite sure whether such talk was proper. But the Vision of Beauty, more at home in the world, was not in the least alarmed at Florian’s torrent of eloquence. On the contrary, she answered him back, as he himself remarked a little later to Will, like the lords of the council, with grace, wisdom, and understanding. Florian brightened, and flowed on. He loved a listener who could toss the ball back to him as fast as he tossed it. And the Vision of Beauty answered him back with lightning speed, and bore her share with credit in the conversation. It was evident as she went on that she knew her Europe. Was it Munich Florian touched upon with the light hand of his craft?—she discoursed of the Van der Weydens and Crivellis in the Pinakothek, like one to the manner born, and had views of her own which were bold, if not prudent, about the meaning and arrangement of the Aeginetan marbles. Was it Florence he attacked?—she was at home at San Marco, and knew her way like a Baedeker round the rooms at the Pitti. Will listened and marvelled, talking little himself, but giving Florian and the Vision of Beauty their heads. It surprised him much to find one female brain could store in its teeming cells so much miscellaneous knowledge.
At last, at a brief break in Florian’s flood of speech, Will found space to inquire, for a purpose of his own, “Would you mind my asking where you got that necklet?”
The Vision of Beauty handed the lid of the box to him. It bore, on a label, the name and address of the jeweller at whose shop she had bought it. “It’s on the way up,” she said, carelessly, “to this hotel from the city.”
That one Shibboleth betrayed her. Florian started in surprise. “Why,” he cried with open eyes, “then you must be an American.”
The beautiful stranger smiled and nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said with marked emphasis, as if to clinch the assertion of her western nationality. “I am an American, and I don’t want to hide it. But you pay what you consider a compliment to the purity of my English all the same, if you mean that till now you haven’t even suspected it.”
Florian made some politely condescending remark, of the sort so obnoxious to the late Mr Lowell, as to the correctness and delicacy of her English accent, and then, in order to show himself quite abreast of the times, inquired expansively if she knew the Van Rensselaers.