“Well, you have to pay—yes. But you must get your tickets from some member of the Malkasten Club. It is the artists’ ball, and they arrange it all.”
“H’m! Ha! And as what do you think of going, Adelaide?” he inquired, turning with suddenness toward her.
“I tell you I had not thought of going—nor thought anything about it. Herr von Francius sent us the pictures, and we were looking over them. That is all.”
Sir Peter turned over the pages and looked at the commonplace costumes therein suggested—Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Picardy Peasant, Maria Stuart, a Snow Queen, and all the rest of them.
“Well, I don’t see anything here that I would wear if I were a woman,” he said, as he closed the book. “February, did you say?”
“Yes,” said I, as no one else spoke.
“Well, it is the middle of January now. You had better be looking out for something; but don’t let it be anything in those books. Let the beggarly daubers see how English women do these things.”
“Do you intend me to understand that you wish us to go to the ball?” inquired Adelaide, in an icy kind of voice.
“Yes, I do,” almost shouted Sir Peter. Adelaide could, despite the whip and rein with which he held her, exasperate and irritate him—by no means more thoroughly than by pretending that she did not understand his grandiloquent allusions, and the vague grandness of the commands which he sometimes gave. “I mean you to go, and your little sister here, and Arkwright too. I don’t know about myself. Now, I am going to ride. Good-morning.”
As Sir Peter went out, von Francius came in. Sir Peter greeted him with a grin and exaggerated expressions of affability at which von Francius looked silently scornful. Sir Peter added: