Prince Khris smiled as he spoke; there was something sardonic and suggestive about the smile which made it almost a grin, and which seemed singularly ugly to Brancepeth considering that the person concerned was the grinner’s only daughter. No one could more completely or more cruelly have expressed the speaker’s conviction that Vanderlin was entirely blameless in this matter.
Mouse listened in extreme irritation; it seemed to be beyond even her Harry’s usual obtuseness to continue the theme of a woman’s indiscretions to that woman’s own father. Besides, she hated women who were divorced: they made it so difficult and unpleasant for the wiser members of their sex.
“My daughter seems to have impressed you, Lord Brancepeth,” continued the Prince. “Where is it that you have seen her?”
“At the Oratory,” said Brancepeth, “and in the street. She is so awfully fetching, you know.”
“She is a woman who makes people look at her,” replied Prince Khristof indifferently. “Did you hear her sing at the Oratory? She has a voice! ah, such a voice! the most flexible mezzo-soprano. She could have made her fortune on the stage.”
“No. She didn’t sing,” said Brancepeth, greatly interested. “She seemed to pray no end, and she cried. But she cried so beautifully. Not as most of them do who make such figures of themselves. But the tears just brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d’ye call ’em, you know, the Magdalens in the picture galleries.”
The Prince laughed outright.
“For felicitous allusion your Englishman has never an equal,” he thought, whilst he said aloud: “My dear lord, what did I tell you? Olga is femme, très femme. If I wanted to weep I should not go to the Oratory myself. But a woman does go. It is a consolation to her to be admired and pitied, and I have no doubt she observed that you did both.”
“She didn’t even see me,” said the younger man, on whose not oversensitive nerves something in the elder’s tone grated.
“Her father don’t do much to save her character,” he thought. “It’s an ill bird fouls its own nest.”