“It's very handsome of you,” said Ruth, for the first time coming into the conversation, though she had been present from its inception, “it's very handsome indeed of you to take so much interest in my affairs—and to discuss them so frankly before my face.”
“It is handsome of us,” agreed Pontycroft, chucking his cigarette away, “and I am glad you appreciate it. For we might be discussing the weather, a vastly more remunerative theme. Has it ever struck you how inept the duffers are who taboo the weather as a subject of conversation? There's nothing else in the physical universe so directly vital to man's welfare as the weather, nothing on which his comfort so immediately depends, and nothing (to take a higher ground) that speaks such an eloquent and varied language to his sense of beauty. The music of the wind, the colours of the sky, the palaces and pictures in the clouds! Yet duffers taboo it as a subject of conversation. The weather is the physiognomy of Heaven towards us, its smile or frown. What else should we discuss? Hello, here he comes.”
Bertram came up the garden path and mounted the terrace.
“My mother,” he announced, “is arriving this evening from Vienna. I was wondering whether you would lunch with us to-morrow, to make her acquaintance.”
“Oho,” whispered Ponty in Ruth's ear, “this really does look like business. Madame Mère is coming to look you over.”
III
I don't know how it is that certain people, without doing or saying anything that can be taken hold of, yet manage to convey to us a very definite and constant sense that they think themselves our betters. Oh, of course, there are people who ostentatiously carry their heads in the air, who openly swagger, patronise, condescend, but those are not the people I mean. I mean the people who are outwardly all pleasantness and respectful courtesy, and inwardly very likely all goodwill, and yet—and yet—we are somehow never allowed for an instant to forget that never do they for an instant become unconscious of their divinely appointed superiority.
“La Duchesse d'Oltramare, née Comtesse de Wohenhoffen,” to copy the legend from her visiting-card, was rather a fat, distinctly an amiable woman of fifty-something, very smartly turned out in the matter of costume by those who are surely the cleverest milliners and dressmakers in the world, the Viennese. She had a milk-white skin, with a little pink in the scarcely wrinkled cheeks, and plump, smooth, milk-white hands, with polished, rosy nails. For the rest, her smiling mouth, the gleam of her grey eyes, and something crisp in the quality of her voice, seemed to connote wit and a sense of humour. Her son had described her to himself as the best-natured and the most sociable being alive; certainly on the morrow, at luncheon, she was all pleasantness, all cordiality even, to her son's guests; yet never, for an instant, could one of them forget that she was perpetually conscious of herself as a great personage, and of them as relatively very small folk indeed. I wish I could tell, I wish I could understand, how the thing was done. Of patronage or condescension—of the sort, at any rate, that could be formulated and resented—there wasn't any trace either in her talk or in her manner; nor of stiffness, pomposity, selfimportance. All pleasantness, all cordiality, she seemed to take them at once into her friendship, almost into her affection—she seemed to conceive (as Bertram had promised himself she would) a particular liking for each of them. And her talk was easy, merry, vivacious, intimate. Yet—yet—yet——
“I'd give a thousand pounds,” said Pontycroft, as they drove home, “for that woman's secret. She knows how to appear the joiliest old soul unhung—and to make other people feel like her fiddlers three.”
“She's insufferable,” said Lucilla irritably. “I should think a Pontycroft and the wife of an English baronet is as good as six foreign duchesses. I should like to put her in her place.”