“I don’t find a remarkable difference in you,” said Sophy, pertly. “You always try to be epigrammatic.”
“Oh, I am no one—a poor follower of the fashion of the hour, whatever it may be. How do you like the music?”
“For music to hear and forget I think it is absolutely delightful.”
“There are some numbers which the piano-organs and the fashionable bands won’t allow you to forget—Zuleika’s song, for instance, and the quartette.”
“I rather hate all but classical music,” replied Sophy, with her fine air, “and I find your famous Signora Vivanti odiously vulgar.”
“Deliciously vulgar, you should have said. Her vulgarity is one of her attractions. To be so pretty, and so graceful, and so clever, and at the same time a peasant to the tips of her fingers—there is the charm.”
“I hate peasants, even when they are as clever as Thomas Carlyle.”
Sefton looked at the pert little face meditatively. She was like Eve, but without Eve’s exceptional loveliness—the loveliness that consists chiefly in delicacy and refinement, an ethereal beauty which makes a woman like a flower. She had Eve’s transparent complexion and changeful colouring. There was the same type, but less beautifully developed. She was quite pretty enough for Sefton to find amusement in teasing her, although all his stronger feelings were given to Signora Vivanti. He called in Charles Street on the following afternoon. It was Mrs. Vansittart’s afternoon at home; and she could not shut her door even against her worst enemy.
Sefton found the usual feminine gossips—mothers and daughters, maiden aunts, and cousins from the country, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and unremarkable faces—the usual sprinkling of well-dressed young men. Among so many people he could secure a few confidential words with Eve, while she poured out the tea, a duty she always performed with her own hands. It was the one thing that reminded her of the old life at Fernhurst, and those jovial teas which had stood in the place of dinner.
She spoke frankly enough of the performance at the Apollo, praised the music and the libretto, declared she had enjoyed it more than any serio-comic opera she had heard during the season; yet Sefton detected a certain constraint when she spoke of Signora Vivanti, which told him that the meeting of the two boats was not forgotten, and that the little scene had left almost as angry a spot upon her memory as that which burnt in his.