"Rather! Wealthy in her own name, you know, and virtually sure of her uncle's fortune. They're very soundly invested, the Hepworth millions. But it's the psychological phase of it that interests me. I'm curious to see what effect she'll have upon his work. For the artistic temperament marriage is twice a lottery. I've never dared risk it myself."
His tone offered confidences, but Jean found his celibacy of slight interest beside Miss Hepworth's. She was conscious that he was permitting her glimpses into the lone sanctities of what he termed his priesthood, as she was aware of a whir and rush of motor-maniacal anecdote on her other side, and of a ceaseless coming and going of courses amidst the generally pervasive fog of conversation. She made the automatic responses which seemed all her immediate fellow-guests required of her, and masked her face with a smile, into which she threw more spontaneity after the bearded one said it suggested Mona Lisa's and belied her glorious youth.
"For she is 'older than the rocks among which she sits,'" he quoted. "You remember Pater's famous interpretation?"
Jean knew neither quotation nor writer, but she was familiar with Leonardo's picture and turned the personality with a neutral question, which served the man as a spring-board for fresh verbal acrobatics, amusing to him and restful for her. He was shrewder than she had thought. In truth, she felt both young and old; young, if this dismal futility could be the flower of much living; old, if by chance it should be, as she questioned, merely puerile.
She sighed for the dinner's end, but when it came and the women, following a custom she had read about without dreaming she should yet encounter it, left the men behind, she sighed to be back with her loquacious seat-mates, talk what jargon they would. Her sex imposed no conversational burden upon any one here. She fitted naturally into none of the little clusters into which the rustling file dissolved; and, after some aimless coasting among these groups where women to whom she had been presented smiled upon her vaguely and chattered of intimacies and happenings peculiarly their own, she cut adrift altogether and grounded with feigned absorption by a cabinet of Chinese lacquer. If Julie meant her kindness, she told a remarkable golden dragon, this was the time to show it, but her hostess remained invisible, and the dragon's gaze, though sympathetic, seemed presently to suggest that the social possibilities of lacquer had their limits. In this crisis, she made a lucky find of a portfolio of Craig's sketches, none of which she had ever seen.
While turning these drawings, she was approached by some one, and, looking up with the expectation of seeing Mrs. Van Ostade, met instead the gaze of a very old and excessively wrinkled lady, who, without tedious formalities, calmly possessed herself of the sketch Jean had in hand.
"They're amazingly deft," she said, after a moment. "Even the academic things have their charm. Take this charcoal, for instance," she went on, selecting another drawing. "It's not the stereotyped Julien study in the least. They couldn't extinguish the boy's individuality. Somewhere here there is another still better."
"You mean this, don't you?" Jean asked, delving into the portfolio for a bold rendering of a human back.
"Ha!" said the old lady, staring. "Of course I do. But what made you think so?"
"It was the only one of the Julien studies you could mean," returned Jean, promptly. "He did not draw like this till the year he exhibited."