"Yes—You can talk to my granddaughter."
"It's thirty years...."
"Yes—The last time was Old Judy Bonnings's reception. They're all dead—all of 'em—D'you remember, Dorchester?"
"Yes—Your Grace—Very well."
Dorchester expressed no surprise—Anything was better than that silence of the last months. Moreover she had trusted Christopher. She had often been amazed at the knowledge that he showed of her mistress's temperament, would allow her temper, her imperious self-will indulgence one day and on another would control them absolutely. He knew what he was doing....
The picture that she presented, however, when helped downstairs by the pontifical Norris and Christopher! the house, with the decorous watchfulness of some large, solemn, and immensely authoritative policeman, surveying her descent, her own little bird-like face, showing nothing but a fine assumption of her splendid appearance before the public, after thirty years, she thus, once again, was saluted by Portland Place! Black furs of Lady Adela's surrounded, enfolded her, and from out of them her eyes haughtily but triumphantly surveyed a crossing-sweeper, two small children with their nurse, a messenger boy, and Roller the coachman. To Roller this must have been the dramatic moment of a somewhat undramatic career, but stout and imperial upon his box his body was held, rigid, motionless, and his large stupid eyes gazed in front of him at the trees and the light cloud-flecked March sky, and moved neither to the right nor to the left.
She was placed in the carriage—Christopher got in beside her and they moved off. He was interested to see the effect that this breaking into the world would have upon her. He felt himself a little in the position of showman and was glad that he had a spring afternoon of gleaming sunshine and a suggestion of budding trees and shrubs in the Portland Crescent garden to provide for her. They were held up by traffic as they crossed the Marylebone Road; drays, hansoms, bicycles passed—there was a stir of voices and wheels, somewhere in the park a band was playing.
He looked at her and saw that she paid no heed, but sat back in the dim shadow, her eyes, he thought, closed. She was, at that instant, more remote from him and all that he represented than she had ever been—Curiously he was moved, just then, by a consciousness of her personality that exceeded anything that he had ever felt in her before.
"Yes, she must have been tremendous," he thought. And then he wondered of what she was thinking, so quiet, and yet, from her very silence, sinister, and then—how could he have not considered this before? What was she going to say to Roddy?
At this, the dark carriage was suddenly, for him, as flashing with life and circumstance as though it had been the florid circle of some popular music-hall—What would she say to Roddy?