Mr. Friseur took me into dinner, and tired me so much that I was obliged to drink champagne, which is always bad for me. You know those dreadful things called Sparklets? You can shoot them into anything, and make it fizz—“aerate” is the proper word. If you can imagine aerated mutton—sparkling mutton—you will know what that young man’s conversation was like. I could see it, in my mind’s eye, advertised as “Friseur’s Frisky Food for Fascinating Females.” It got up my nose and stodged my spiritual digestion at the same time. When I let loose any pleasant fancy, he became sentimental; and when, just to restore his balance, I talked about bishops, and asked him to pass the mustard, his ideas frothed clumsily, and he said that he didn’t know artists went to church—and wasn’t mustard bad for the palette! I know he was trying to please me, poor thing, and that I was very ungrateful and nasty; but I felt all the time that he was really resorting to the device of the curlew, who utters shrill cries to divert the attention of a harmless traveller from its nest. He was trying to prevent me from remembering that he had had a respectable commercial home and upbringing. If young men in business had more outdoor pursuits, they would easily see in proper proportion such a trifle as their own origin. It is sitting on an office stool that makes people begin to wish that they were descended from a long line of Vikings. Miss Darling, I find, loves the silly thing, and intends to marry him. She is a simple person with a heart of velvet, and she will grow old with her hairdresser, taking him out to dinner three times a week, seeing the sparkle subside and the mutton grow tough. She will have, probably, about three sententious, knock-kneed little boys, and one anæmic, over-dressed little girl, and will end her days in a house three times as large as the one in which she began housekeeping. There ought to be a larger kind of men who prey upon and eat hairdressers.
I will write next week, and continue the story of what a journalist would call “A lady artist’s plucky attempt to disarm Provincials.”
Yours ever,
Georgina.
CHAPTER XVI
“Longmoor,” Millport.
My dear Louise,—I have nearly finished Mr. Merchant’s portrait. I showed it to him yesterday for the first time, and it apparently “proves satisfactory,” so I shall very likely be here for weeks. He gives me two hours sitting every day, which, I am beginning to realize, is a remarkable thing for a business man to do. It is almost the first time in his life, except during the inevitable August, that he has not left his house at a quarter to nine every morning. But he has been ill, and I think that he intends, sooner or later, to retire from business and live away from town, as this is what they all aspire to. In the meantime he is only allowed to work for a few hours at a time, so he has taken the opportunity to have his portrait painted and so fill up the leisure which might otherwise hang heavy on his hands.
He went off this morning at eleven, and I worked on without him until luncheon. Then I was shown some more of the social machinery of Millport; that part of it which decides in what mood the fighting apparatus shall begin its day’s work—a very important matter, if you come to think of it. Mrs. Merchant had a party of women representing different sections of society, and, so far as I could judge, they did not seem to be working quite in unison. The only one whom I knew was Miss Darling, who is a great friend of Mrs. Merchant’s and comes to everything. There was also a fat, elderly thing, in a satin coat and skirt, plumed hat and boa, besides a prettier edition of Mrs. Merchant, dressed in tweeds, which are the uniform of the more distant suburbs and indicate the magic word “county”; and last of all, like a French squirrel in a hurry, murmuring some domestic apology, the wife of a professor at the University.
