‘You have had a very quick run, surely?’ said the Princess Napraxine, stretching out her tan glove.
‘Well, we did all we knew, and crammed on every stitch we had,’ the new comer answered, as he kissed the tips of the glove, and murmured in a lower tone, ‘Were you not here?’
Then he crossed over to where Lady Brancepeth sat, and kissed her cheek with a brother’s indifference.
‘Dear Wilkes, are you all right?’ he said as he took up a majolica stool and seated himself between them.
‘Take that bamboo chair, Geraldine,’ asked the Princess. ‘That china stool does not suit your long legs at all. How many hours really have you been coming from Genoa? I am fearfully angry with you, by the way; how could you take this place?’
‘Because you told me,’ answered Lord Geraldine, staring hard. ‘What was the command? Take it, coûte que coûte. Not an “if”; not a “perhaps”; not a “but.” Wilkes, do you not call that too cruel?’
‘My dear Ralph,’ said Lady Brancepeth, ‘any woman’s instructions should always be construed so liberally that a margin is left for her at the eleventh hour to change her mind. But do not distress yourself. I do not think Mme. Napraxine really dislikes the place. It is only her way. When she has bought a thing she always finds a flaw in it. It is her habit to condemn everything. She is a pessimist from sheer want of ever having had real disappointment.’
‘Look at the house. It speaks for itself,’ said the Princess, contemptuously. ‘Why did you not telegraph and say that it was a patchwork of every known order of architecture? I would have told you to break off negotiations.’
‘But you had seen the photographs.’
‘Photographs! Would you know your own mother from a photograph if you had not been told beforehand whose it was?’