Lady Cynthia Cairns's drawing-room was not an artistic apartment; it was too comfortable for that. There were too many chairs and sofas; and they were designed on broad lines for the stolid, permanent sitting of stout, comfortable bodies. There were too many photographs on view of persons distinguished for their solidity rather than for their good looks, the portraits of the guests whom one would expect to find installed in those chairs. A grand piano was there; but the absence of any music in its neighbourhood indicated that its purpose was chiefly to symbolize harmony in the home life, and to provide a spacious crush-room for the knick-knacks overflowing from many tables. These were dominated by a large signed photograph of Queen Victoria. In front of an open fireplace, where bright logs were crackling, slept an enormous black cat on a leopard's skin hearthrug.
Out of this sea of easy circumstances rose Lady Cynthia. A daughter of the famous Earl of Cheviot, hers was a short but not unmajestic figure, encased in black silks which rustled and showed flashes of beads and jet in the dancing light of the fire. She had the firm pose of a man, and a face entirely masculine with strong lips and chin and humourous grey eyes, the face of a judge.
Miss Gwendolen Cairns, who had apparently been reading to her mother when the visitors arrived, was a tall girl with fair cendré hair. The simplicity of the cut of her dress and its pale green color showed artistic sympathies of the old aesthetic kind. The maintained amiability of her expression and manner indicated her life's task of smoothing down feelings ruffled by her mother's asperities, and of oiling the track of her father's career.
"How are you, my dears?" Lady Cynthia was saying. "I'm so glad you've come in spite of the tempest. Gwendolen was just reading me to sleep. Do you ever read to your husband, Mrs. Barrington? It is a good idea, if only your voice is sufficiently monotonous."
"I hope we haven't interrupted you," murmured Asako, who was rather alarmed at the great lady's manner.
"It was a shock when I heard the bell ring. I cried out in my sleep—didn't I, Gwendolen?—and said, 'It's the Beebees!'"
"I'm glad it wasn't as bad as all that," said Geoffrey, coming to his wife's rescue; "would that have been the worst that could possibly happen?"
"The very worst," Lady Cynthia answered. "Professor Beebee teaches something or other to the Japanese, and he and Mrs. Beebee have lived in Japan for the last forty years. They remind me of that old tortoise at the Zoo, who has lived at the bottom of the sea for so many centuries that he is quite covered with seaweed and barnacles. But they are very sorry for me, because I only came here yesterday. They arrive almost every day to instruct me in the path in which I should go, and to eat my cakes by the dozen. They don't have any dinner the days they come here for tea. Mrs. Beebee is the Queen of the Goonies."
"Who are the Goonies?" asked Geoffrey.
"The rest of the old tortoises. They are missionaries and professors and their wives and daughters. The sons, of course, run away and go to the bad. There are quite a lot of the Goonies, and I see much more of them than I do of the geishas and the samurais and the harakiris and all the Eastern things, which Gwendolen will talk about when she gets home. She is going to write a book, poor girl. There's nothing else to do in this country except to write about what is not here. It's very easy, you know. You copy it all out of some one else's book, only you illustrate it with your own snapshots. The publishers say that there is a small but steady demand, chiefly for circulating libraries in America. You see, I have been approached already on the subject, and I have not been here many months. So you've seen Reggie Forsyth already, he tells me. What do you think of him?"