“Molly. Perhaps you will look in on us occasionally.”
“Uncle Seb left her some money?”
“Lots,” Mrs. Wilbur exaggerated.
“I didn’t hear that,” he mused.
“But you needn’t bother about her now,” she smiled placidly at him. “Molly has developed; she won’t play with you now.”
Anthon left the subject. His appreciation of his sister rose in true British fashion in proportion to the snubbing she administered. He offered to present some of his set. But Mrs. Wilbur gaily declined the privilege.
“No, thank you! Celebrities bore me. I don’t care to dine with the title-page of a magazine.”
She gave him her hand, and he went away, feeling as if he had been treated like a small boy. Mrs. Wilbur laughed to herself that afternoon, while she ran about from shop to shop, or stopped to gaze in the windows, “like any vulgar American.”
Mrs. Wilbur decided to wait for Molly in Paris, where she had a number of small matters to attend to. When the sombre days of early November came on, she spent many hours at the Louvre. One morning she was standing in a small deserted room, before a Holbein portrait, marvelling at an art which seemed more irrevocably lost than most,—at the power of the sure hand that stiffly traced a human face, with the simplest detail, and left it there for centuries, a living criticism of character!