“Ah! Is that so? That is nice of your brother. Sometimes men, you know, make use of their wives or their sisters to help them in their business relationships. I have known a man use his pretty daughter to gain a client. Beauty levels all, you see. Not nice, no; I suppose Herr von Holzen, is—well—let us call him a foreign savant. Such a nice broad term, you know; covers such a plentiful lack of soap.” And she laughed easily, with eyes that were quite grave and alert.
“My brother does not say much about him,” answered Dorothy Roden. “Percy never does tell me much of his affairs, and I am not sorry. I am sure I should not understand them. Stocks and shares and freights and things. I never quite know whether a freight is part of a ship; do you?”
“No. There are so many things more useful to know, are there not?—things about people and human nature, for instance.”
“Yes,” said Dorothy, looking at her companion thoughtfully—“yes.”
And Mrs. Vansittart returned that thoughtful glance. “And the other man,” she said suddenly, “Mr.—Cornish—do you know him?”
“He called at the Villa des Dunes. My brother brought him in to tea the evening of arrival of the first batch of malgamiters,” replied Dorothy.
“Mr. Cornish interests me,” said Mrs. Vansittart. “I knew him when he was a boy—or little more than a boy. He came to Weimar with a tutor to learn German when I happened to be living there. I have heard of him from time to time since. One sees his name in the society papers, you know. He is one of those persons of whom something is expected by his friends—not by himself. The young man who expects something of himself is usually disappointed. Have you ever noticed in the biographies of great men, Miss Roden that people nearly always began to expect something of them when they were quite young? As if they were cast in a different mould from the very first. Really great men, I mean not the fashionable pianist or novelist of the hour whose portrait is in every illustrated journal for perhaps two months, and then he is forgotten.”
Mrs. Vansittart spoke quickly in a foreign manner, asking with a certain vivacity questions which required no answer. Dorothy Roden was not slow of speech, but she touched topics with less airiness. Her mind seemed a trifle insular in its tendencies. One topic attracted her, and the rest were set aside.
“Why does Mr. Cornish interest you?” she asked.
Mrs. Vansittart shrugged her shoulders and leant back in her deep chair.