“Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you won’t stay?”
Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the hall and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot hedge. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she was murmuring hurriedly. “I don’t see your husband anywhere about—never mind—so good of you—good-bye——”
“Come again soon, won’t you?”
“Yes, yes—oh, yes!... No, no, please don’t!” (Mrs. Pratt had made a half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). “Straight across the Heath you said, didn’t you? I shall find it quite easily! Don’t come any further—good-bye——”
And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt’s extended fingers as timorously as she might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.
II
THE POND-ROOM
The truth was not very far to seek: Lady Tasker was too old for these things. Nobody could have expressed this more effectively than Mrs. Cosimo Pratt herself, had it entered the mind of Mrs. Pratt to conceive that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker was. “Those casts!” Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement—or rather Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the Wedding Service about making over to your husband, along with your love and obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name. “Those poor casts!... Of course they may not be very beautiful—,” here the original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes, “—but such as they are—goodness me! How can people be so prurient, Cosimo? Don’t they see that what they really prove has nothing at all to do with the casts, but—ahem!—a good deal to do with their own imaginations? I don’t want to use the word ‘morbid,’ but really!... Well, thank goodness Corin and Bonniebell won’t grow up like that! Afraid of the beautiful, innocent human form!... Now that’s what I’ve always claimed, Cosimo—that that’s the type of mind that’s made all the mischief we’ve got to set right to-day.”
But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden (or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)—and in the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall—the very forefront of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt’s foreign friends, who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied. The Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room, and elsewhere....