From among the wealth of books, new and old, that strewed the table, she picked up one, whose yellow paper back “faisait espérer des choses,” only to throw it down in disgust, since a very slight skimming of its pages proved it to belong to the literature of the jeune fille; and where a French novel is innocent, it is innocent with a vengeance.
She walked to one of the long windows. Should she go out? She decided not. Rain-charged clouds hung over the ruddy trees of the park. There was not the slightest chance in those miles of walks, whose beginnings she saw stretching hopelessly away in their odious privacy, of meeting any one not belonging to the place, and if you had to endure boredom it might as well be a dry and warm as a wet and cold one. She tried the pictures. They were all hopelessly good, some dusky, some mellow, glowing and glooming from the harmonious dull-green brocade of their background. Why on earth didn’t they sell them, now that there was a “boom” in these dingy old masters, and hang something worth looking at on their walls? Her mind reverted admiringly to the canvases—how unlike these!—that had adorned “Le Nid,” Claire’s villa at Monaco.
Miss Ransome had not considered all her mother’s methods commendable, but surely her taste in pictures was perfect. Where had they all gone to now, those charming specimens of modern French art—“Le Bain,” “La Surprise”?
Her disparaging contemplation of the picture at which she was staring was broken in upon by the voice of Edward.
“It is hung too high,” he said, not guessing the spirit in which she was gazing. “I told Camilla so, but she is not fond of change.”
“People of her age seldom are, I suppose,” returned Bonnybell, radiant at her interrupted solitude, but at once feeling that she had said the wrong thing.
“We have always thought it a Dierick Bouts. Camilla’s grandfather brought it from Bruges,” he went on, in a tone that seemed to put him further away from her than his first remark had done. “Of course, when we sent it to a Winter Exhibition at Burlington House, the critics pronounced it a copy, but we took leave to disbelieve them.”
“I am sure you were quite right,” rejoined she, with outward emphasis and an inward wonder why any one should care to discuss the paternity of such a grotesque old croûte.
Apparently her acting was all too good, and took him in.
“Since you are fond of pictures,” he said, “perhaps you will let me show you some rather good portraits in the morning-room. They are not all by any very well-known masters; but though their interest is chiefly historical, they are not badly painted.”