“Yes, the cousin you told me of.”
“Did I tell you of him?”
“Don’t you remember you told me he said all women are in the same trade? Well, he is veritably a cynic of cynics, for he candidly informed me, after I had been bantering and mystifying him with my foreknowledge of him, that he had simply quoted Schopenhauer.”
“Where did you meet him?” he asked, a little interested.
“At the Dudley-Heatons’s reception a fortnight ago. I call him the Minister of the Interior, he’s such an epicure—the politician, I mean, not your cousin. There was Lord Fashborough there, the man who’s just been appointed president of the Cruelty to Children Commission, and who glittered with stars and orders like a comic-opera Begum. He it was introduced your cousin—at my request, of course. Your cousin told me the Begum and he had travelled together in Spain, when the Begum’s appetite for bull-fights and cock-fights was insatiable. I have never been in Spain, and two of my favorite illusions were destroyed at one fell blow. It seems that they simply push reluctant, decrepit old horses on to the horns of the bulls. And then the Spanish women! Your cousin describes them as ugly and unwashed.”
He shuddered. Why would Miss Regan perversely obtrude the prose of life upon his consciousness? He would not answer her—he tried to drift again with the magic stream, but the spell was broken. He knew it was Eleanor’s music that made the pictures, and that the odors came from the flowers at Olive’s throat.
“He is painting Nor’s portrait,” she went on, indifferently.
He had to answer her now—in a stifled interrogative, masking a sudden sharp agony and foreboding.
“What, Herbert?”
“Yes; he asked her to give him some sittings. He hasn’t altogether become a critic, you see.”