"I shall be quite out of it among all this talent!" sighed Mordaunt; and he shrugged his shoulders, with a smile.
"How absurd you are, Sir Mordaunt! Is he accustomed to have compliments paid him all the time, Miss Ballinger? Is he fishing?"
"He has had too many since he landed. Don't increase the evil, Mrs. Courtly. It is quite time we went to the Wild West. In New York we both ran the risk of being spoiled."
"We shall not spoil you here," rejoined her hostess, with one of her bright smiles, "because it is what is best in you, and therefore impossible to spoil, that we Bostonians shall chiefly prize. I claim to be a Bostonian, you know, because I was born there. Ah! I see you are looking at that small picture by Jansen. Do you recognize the face? It is supposed to be Mary Stuart."
"She must have had as many heads as Cerberus," said Mordaunt, "for no two resemble each other."
"Pardon me! this is very like the one at Windsor. Next it is a Rembrandt I bought at the Demidoff sale at Florence."
"How wonderful, to make an ugly old woman so interesting!" Grace exclaimed. "What an odd sort of battledore and shuttlecock Art and Nature play! One would not be attracted by a face like a withered walnut till one saw this admirable portrait. The next time one saw it in the flesh one would be delighted."
"Well, I shouldn't," said Mordaunt, moving on to a cabinet of miniatures. "I like these much better. In miniatures they have always got such awfully nice skins—like velvet. I wish more women in real life had such complexions. That must have been a little duck—that woman with the powdered hair."
"Madame de Pompadour—well, she was a duck, in her way. She swam in troubled waters, and so did this poor bird, who was more of a swan, Marie Antoinette, white and stately, with her long throat. And this is our Martha Washington, more of the barn-door fowl, and near to her Lafayette, and further on Franklin. I love to talk to these historic ghosts. I can take up one of these miniatures and be carried right back to those days. I seem to read all their stories in those faces. But here is the tea, and more substantial food than ghosts can give us."
Two servants entered with trays, which they arranged on a table, with an old Chelsea service, out of which it was manifest one could drink nothing but a "dish" of tea, and a George III. "equipage" of silver, urn-shaped kettle and all. Grace could have fancied herself in an old English country-house, where all had remained unchanged for the last hundred years.