While Leighton and Balcomb stood talking in the library, Herr Schmidt, in the drawing-room, lectured the rest of the company in his difficult English. He now fell upon the piano with a crash and nodded to Zelda, who began one of her solos. When this had been sung to his satisfaction, the director called for Olive and Captain Pollock.
Pollock was greatly liked by the people he had begun to know in Mariona. The men about the Tippecanoe Club had the reputation of scrutinizing new-comers a little superciliously, in the way of old members of a small club, who resent the appearance of strangers at the lounging-room fireside. But Pollock fitted into places as though he had always been used to them. He told a good story or he sang a song well, when called on to do something at the grill-room Saturday nights. Mrs. Carr had given him one of the best parts in the opera.
The young officer and Olive carried off with great animation a dialogue in song into which Herr Schmidt had been able to get some real humor.
“You haven’t told me how much you like my cousin,” said Zelda to Leighton, when he sat down by her in an interval of parley between the director and Mrs. Carr. “I expect something nice.”
“Nothing could be easier. She’s a great hit! She’s a discovery! She’s an ornament to society!”
“Humph! That sounds like sample sentences from a copy-book. A man with a reputation as an orator to sustain ought to be able to do better than that.”
“Not having such a reputation—”
“Not even thinking one has—”
“Oh, I’m conceited, am I?”
“I hadn’t thought of it before, but no doubt it’s true,” said Zelda, looking across the room to where Jack Balcomb was talking with his usual vivacity to a girl in the chorus whom he had never met before. He was perfectly at ease, as though leaning against grand pianos in handsome drawing-rooms and talking to pretty girls had always been his mission in life.