“I may send the bills in to Masters, I suppose?” she asked. Colonel Masters was the duke’s agent, a silent, conscientious ex-soldier entirely insensible to her own attractions.
“Certainly. He has my authority to discharge them all. You seem to me to have been more extravagant than usual in your orders.”
He looked around him as he spoke; they were standing in a long gallery at the head of the grand staircase. Flowers—flowers—flowers, met the eye in every direction, and the various devices which held the electric lights were concealed on the walls by millions of roses and orchids.
“I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea,” said Otterbourne; “but I think a gentleman’s house should be thought good enough for his friends, even for his future sovereigns, without all this dressing-up and disguising. Modern fashions are extremely snobbish.”
“They certainly are; there I quite agree with you,” said his daughter-in-law, and meant what she said. “A fine house like this wants no dressing-up. But we must do as other people do, or look odd.”
“Or you think you must,” said the duke, viewing with small pleasure a suit of Damascene armor which an ancestor had worn before Acre and Antioch, wreathed and smothered with long trails made of the united blossoms of cattleya and tigredia, whilst within its open vizor two golden orioles sat upon a nest.
“Do you think that in good taste?” he said, pointing to it.
“No; execrable. Nothing done in time is ever otherwise,” said Mouse with unusual sincerity. “We are never merry, and we are never sorry; so we heap up flowers to make believe for us at our dances and our burials. You are quite right, Pater, in the abstract. But, you see, we can’t live in the abstract. We must do as others do.”
“I should have thought the only true privilege of birth was to set us free of that obligation,” said Otterbourne, to whom his noble old palace looked on these occasions very much like the sweep who was muffled up in evergreens as Jack-in-the-Green on May-day in the little old-world country town which clustered under the hills of his big place, Staghurst Castle.
“Of course he is right enough,” she thought, as she drove away. “The house would be ten thousand times better left to itself, and we are all as vulgar as it is possible to be. We have lost the secret of elegance—we have only got display. Why couldn’t he give me a blank check, instead of making me send in the bills to Masters? He is such a screw! He wants to save all he can for his precious ’Beric.”