Mr. Weston raised a protesting hand. "Please! I've heard her."
Maitland laughed and strode off into the dusk, leaving Arthur Weston to sit and look at the swans. The nursery-maids and perambulators had gone; the Chinese pagoda on the artificial island showed a sudden spark of light, and the arc-lamps across the park sputtered into the evening haze like lurching moons. The chill of the water and the night made him shiver. That youngster was so big and up-standing and satisfied with life! And certainly he was in love with Fred.
"Then she'll be off my hands," Fred's man of business said; "what a relief!"
And life looked as bleak and uninteresting as the cold dusk of the deserted park.
CHAPTER IV
"I never see her from morning till night," Mrs. Payton said. "Rather different from my day! When I was a young lady, girls stayed indoors with their mothers."
Mrs. Payton's mother, stroking her white gloves down over her knuckly fingers, shrugged her shoulders: "You didn't like 'those days' so very much yourself, my dear. But of course Freddy is shocking. It isn't that she has bad taste—she has no taste! All I hope is that she won't publicly disgrace us. Bessie Childs says that her husband says this business idea is perfect nonsense."
The two ladies were in the double parlor on the left of the wide hall of No 15. It was a gloomy place, even when the ailanthus-trees had lost their leaves; the French windows were so smothered in plush and lace that the gleam of narrow mirrors between them could not lighten the costly ugliness. In its day the room had been very costly. The carpet, with its scrolls and garlands, the ebony cabinets, picked out in gilt—big and foolish and empty—the oil-paintings in vast, tarnished frames, must all have been very expensive. There was an ormolu clock on the black marble mantelpiece holding Time stationary at 7.20 o'clock of some forgotten morning or evening; the bronzes on either side of it—a fisher-maid with her string of fish, and a hunter bearing an antelope on his shoulders—were dulled by the smoky years. Opposite the fireplace, against the chocolate-brown wall-paper, Andrew Payton, on a teakwood pedestal, glimmered in white marble blindness. Beside him, the key-board of a grand piano was yellowing in untouched silence. The room was so dim that Mrs. Holmes, coming in out of the sunshine, stumbled over a rug.