And a moment later, the enflamed girl left the room warbling softly: Depuis le Jour.
“Holy Virgin,” the Countess said, addressing herself to the ceiling. “Should his Weariness, the Prince, yield himself to this caprice....”
The Queen shifted a diamond bangle from one of her arms to the other.
“She reads at such a pace,” she complained, “and when I asked her where she had learnt to read so quickly, she replied ‘On the screens at Cinemas.’”
“I do not consider her at all distinguished,” the Countess commented turning her eyes away towards the room.
It was a carved-ceiled, and rather lofty room, connected by tall glass doors with other rooms beyond. Peering into one of these the Countess could see reflected the “throne,” and a little piece of broken Chippendale brought from England, that served as a stand for a telephone, wrought in ormolu and rock-crystal, which the sun’s rays at present were causing to emit a thousand playful sparks. Tapestry panels depicting the Loves of Mejnoun and Leileh half concealed the silver boisèries of the walls, while far down the room, across old rugs from Chirvan that were a marvellous wonder, showed fortuitous jardinières, filled with every flowering-kind of plant. Between the windows were canopied recesses, denuded of their statues by the Queen’s desire, “in order that they might appear suggestive,” while through the windows themselves, the Countess could catch across the fore-court of the castle, a panorama of the town below, with the State Theatre and the Garrisons, and the Houses of Parliament, and the Hospital, and the low white dome, crowned by turquoise-tinted tiles of the Cathedral, which was known to all churchgoers as the Blue Jesus.
“It would be a fatal connexion,” the Queen continued, “and it must never, never be!”
By way of response the Countess exchanged with her sovereign a glance that was known in Court circles as her tortured-animal look: “Their Oriental majesties,” she observed, “to judge from the din, appear to have already endeared themselves with the mob!”
The Queen stirred slightly amid her cushions.
“For the aggrandisement of the country’s trade, an alliance with Dateland is by no means to be depreciated,” she replied, closing her eyes as though in some way or other this bullion to the State would allow her to gratify her own wildest whims, the dearest, perhaps, of which was to form a party to excavate (for objects of art) among the ruins of Chedorlahomor, a faubourg of Sodom.