The hunt dinner was a weird and deafening affair, and the Weber-Field ball costumes unbelievable.
Owing to reaction and exhaustion, repentant girls came to Jacqueline requesting an interim of intellectual recuperation; so she obligingly announced a lecture in the jade room, and talked to them very prettily about jades and porcelains, suiting her words to their intellectual capacity, which could grasp Kang-he porcelains and Celedon and Sang-de-bœuf, but balked at the "three religions," and found blanc de Chine uninspiring. So she told them about the famille vert and the famille rose; about the K'ang Hsi period, which they liked, and how the imperial kilns at Kiangsi developed the wonderful clair de lune "turquoise blue" and "peach bloom," for which some of their friends or relatives had paid through their various and assorted noses.
All of this her audience found interesting because they recognised in the exquisite examples from Desboro's collection, with which Jacqueline illustrated her impromptu lecture, objects both fashionable and expensive; and what is both fashionable and expensive appeals very forcibly to mediocrity.
"I saw a jar like that one at the Clydesdales'," said Reggie Ledyard, a trifle excited at his own unexpected intelligence. "How much is it worth, Miss Nevers?"
She laughed and looked at the vase between her slender fingers.
"Really," she said, "it isn't worth very much. But wealthy people have established fictitious values for many rather crude and commonplace things. If people had the courage to buy only what appealed to them personally, there would be a mighty crash in tumbling values."
"We'd all wake up and find ourselves stuck," remarked Van Alstyne, who possessed some pictures which he had come to loathe, but for which he had paid terrific prices. "Jim, do you want to buy any primitives, guaranteed genuine?"
"There's the thrifty Dutch trader for you," said Reggie. "I'm loaded with rickety old furniture, too. They got me to furnish my place with antiques! But you don't see me trying to sell 'em to my host at a house party!"
"Stop your disputing," said Desboro pleasantly, "and ask Miss Nevers for her professional opinion later. The chances are that you both have been properly stuck, and I never had any sympathy for wealthy ignorance, anyway."
But Ledyard and Van Alstyne, being very wealthy, became frightfully depressed over the unfeeling jibes of Desboro; and Jacqueline seemed to be by way of acquiring a pair of new clients.