Mrs. Massarene smoothed down her beautiful gown with a nervous worried gesture.
“Oh, ma’am, Katherine’s very discreet, and by her letters all she seems to be thinking about is the white temples and the black men.”
“There are no black men in India, and you’d have done much better to keep her at home,” said her visitor sharply. “What is she like?”
She intended this young woman for her brother Ronald, whatever she might be like.
Maternal pride made Mrs. Massarene’s inexpressive and commonplace face for once eloquent and not ordinary: its troubled and dreary expression of chronic bewilderment lighted and changed; her wide mouth smiled, her colorless eyes grew almost bright.
“If you’ll honor me, ma’am, by stepping this way,” she said with alacrity as she rose.
“Horses step—people don’t,” said Lady Kenilworth, unkindly, as she accompanied the person whose instructress and tormentor she was, into a smaller room in which, set as it were upon an altar, a white marble bust stood on a plinth of jasper with a fence of hothouse flowers around it; hanging on the wall behind it was a portrait. Lady Kenilworth looked critically at both bust and portrait. She was surprised to find them what they were.
“A classic face, and clever,” she said to the anxious mother. “Are they at all like? The bust’s Dalou’s, isn’t it? And the portrait——”
“They are both the image of her, ma’am,” said Mrs. Massarene, with great triumph in the effect which they produced. “But the marble pleases me best.”
Lady Kenilworth was still looking at them critically through her double eye-glass. She was thinking that the original of that straight and somewhat severe profile was perhaps as well in India until Prince Khris and she had tired of the Massarene vein. On the other hand, unless the girl came home, she could not be married to Hurstmanceaux.