It was Anthony Cowper who reported the conversation. Hugo blushed a little and laughed.
‘So hard on dear Paulina,’ Mrs. Connell had said to Anthony, ‘to have to go on the stage—not that it was a penance at all to her, for if ever a girl had a passion for her art it was Paulina; but of course you understand, Mr. Cowper, it is not the sort of profession her father’s family would approve at all. My family is different, you see. We are all artists—artists to the finger-tips—and you understand, Mr. Cowper, to an artist social distinctions do not exist. But I do feel it hard for Paulina. . . . Yes, of course, her father’s relations do not take the interest in her which one might have expected.’
Anthony Cowper was a mimic, and he made us laugh very much when he described the interview with Mrs. Connell; and now and again he turned to Hugo and said: ‘It was just like that, Hugo, wasn’t it?’ and Hugo admitted with good humour that it was.
‘She was rather a terror,’ he agreed. ‘But Paulina was quite different, and she didn’t like it much, I thought.’
Hugo gave a tea-party in Guy’s rooms before he went back to Oxford. He invited us all to meet Paulina, and Mrs. Connell came too.
‘I had to ask her too,’ he explained, ‘for she said she did not allow Paulina to go out alone.’
Paulina was beautiful; that was true. She was very fair, with bright, golden hair, very straight and smooth and shining, and serious blue eyes. She had red lips, curved and rather like a Rossetti saint. She was dressed in white, with white furs, and she did not talk very much. She sat looking beautiful and statuesque, and made rather solemn remarks from time to time.
‘It is only in the true Socialist State that art will be duly recognized,’ she said, and at another time: ‘True art has no need for subterfuge.’
What she meant I didn’t know, for I only caught scraps of the conversation. Guy and Anthony Cowper were talking to her—but I felt convinced somehow that she didn’t really know what she meant herself that she was repeating things she had learnt from somebody else, and that annoyed me, for I had never liked that sort of person.
She always talked about Art. Once she said: