Miss Rowrer liked him better, with this air of one convinced of his own importance and duties, than when he was making fun of himself with the skeptical tone which she abhorred. Just as she was glad to know a real and genuine bohemian, so she was delighted to walk with the scion of a legendary family, whose ancestress figured in the Louvre, painted by Botticelli, surrounded by angels in a golden sky. She found it amusing to take the arm of a man in whose pedigree there was the equal of the White Lady of Potsdam and the Cavalier of Hatfield House. It was all so un-American and exciting.
She was also really at her ease in the Louvre among these old royal personages. She pleased herself in the midst of history and polished courts. Her intelligence revealed to her their grandeur.
“I like sincere men who are faithful to their traditions,” she said. “There is a noble side to it all which I understand.”
She admired the effete generations who had heaped here, to the very ceiling, royal escutcheons and chimeras and victories.
“There is something great in it,” she said; “you feel the conviction of it. Compare it with the frightful style which artists bungle with nowadays! The beautiful has had its time here; it is our turn now, in our great Republic! Faith in traditions—that is what produces masterpieces! Whether royalty, as in the old times, or the Republic, as with us—I recognize only that.”
“But there is a golden mean,” the duke said, conciliatingly.
“Away with the golden mean, with cowardly compromises and satisfied selfishness, with falsehood and insincerity. We must be one thing or another—loyalty before all else!”
Grandma and Will approved this.
“Ah!” the duke thought to himself, struck by Miss Rowrer’s accents of conviction, “it wouldn’t be well to fail in one’s words to this lady!”
“This is a Signorelli,” Caracal explained, pointing out a picture; “this is a Filippo Lippi; this is a Pinturicchio.”