Jean laughed.
“Simply horribly angry!” he said, smiling into her eyes. “How dare you think of eggs in the middle of your singing lesson? I’ll eat them any way you like.”
That was the end of the lesson. Jean was very kind to Margot about it; he ate an excellent lunch, but he could not help feeling that she was less of an artist than he had hoped.
Familiarity is a deadly touchstone to the imagination; only the best and noblest impulses can survive it. To continue to admire what we see daily and know thoroughly we must be either very humble or very loving, and Jean was for the moment neither. He had not yet begun to exact very much from himself, but he expected a good deal from others. The critical instinct is generally vicarious.
Unfortunately Margot belonged to that type of woman who loves to have demands made upon her. She liked Jean to use the best she had to give as a sofa cushion; she was only too glad that it could be used at all. Her mistake lay deeper than his, for she did not realize that she loved a man who did not care very much for sofa cushions, and who would therefore never use even her best for long.
CHAPTER XIII
IT was a cold, damp day in the middle of February. Paris had for the moment borrowed a fog from her neighbour across the Channel; and habituated as she is to sunlight and clear air, she looked dirtier and far less comfortable than consistently and imperturbably grimy London.
“It is the kind of day,” said Romain D’Ucelles, looking out of the window, “in which one might as well do one’s duty; anything else would be equally unpleasant. My angel,” he added to his wife over his shoulder, “do you require the motor this morning?”
“Yes,” said Madame D’Ucelles, without looking up from her correspondence.
“But I am desolated,” said Romain, “because I shall have to deprive you. I am about to go out in it myself.”