“Oh,” he urged, “if I’m not to say that you are beautiful, we might as well not have any birthday at all. That is its most elementary fact—lying at the very foundation of everything. To ignore it would be like trying to celebrate the Fifth of November without a guy.”
Again she shot a glance of dubiety at him. “I don’t know in the least how to take that,” she confessed, with a quiver on her lip.
He laughed outright at this, and gaily patted her on the shoulder. “This unnatural Attic levity of mine is all the fault of the frieze. I’m a cat in a strange garret here. Hasten with me to the Assyrian rooms, if you want to see the utmost height of solemnity it is given to mortals to attain.”
He was not quite as good as his word, when they began loitering along before the carved tablets from Nineveh and Khorsabad. Instruction he could not help piling upon his companion, for this was his subject, but he found himself seasoning it with all sorts of sprightly commentaries on the serious text. Of grave and sportive alike he had so much to say that Vestalia took his arm, and leant upon it as they made their slow progress through the long corridors. The contact was exhilarating to him. He could not be sure that she was assimilating any large proportion of his discourse, but her pretence of interest at least was very pretty, and the touch of her arm in his was full of inspiration to his tongue.
Down in the basement, or crypt, he stood before the lions of Assur-Banipal, and talked at length. She said she had read Byron’s “Sardanapalus,” and he told her how those detestable linguists, the Greeks, had altered the name, and how the Assyrian legends of a great warrior and sovereign had become twisted in the Hellenic after-version to depict a sublimation of debauched effeminacy and luxury run mad. She listened with her shoulder against his—but now he had other auditors as well.
“Excuse me, sir,” the urgent and anxious voice of a stranger said close behind him, “but you seem to be extraordinarily well posted indeed on these sculptures here. I hope you will not object to my daughter and me standing where we can hear your remarks.”
Mosscrop turned, and saw before him an elderly man, with a mild expression, and hair and beard of extreme whiteness. He was soberly attired, and carried in his hand a broad-brimmed hat of woven white straw. He bowed courteously, and indicated by a gentle gesture the young lady standing at his side.
“I should delight, sir, to have my daughter be privileged to profit by your remarks,” he repeated, and bowed again.
The daughter was a dark, well-rounded girl, dressed with much elegance. Her face was strikingly Oriental in type, with coal-black tresses drawn low over the temples, and a skin of a uniform ivory hue. She said nothing, but looked at Vestalia’s hair.
Mosscrop spoke somewhat abruptly. “You are certainly welcome, but it happens that I have finished my remarks, as you call them.”