Olive Ilden gave him her view while Margot and Gurdy explored the garden that opened from her Chelsea drawing room. She sat painting her lips with a perfumed stick of deep red and mimicked his drawl, “No, her things ar-r-ren’t too bright, old man. She isn’t too much dressed up. It’s merely that this thin faced time of ours isn’t dressed up to her. She’s Della Robbia and we’re—Whistler. It’s burgherdom. Prudence. It’s the nineteenth century. It’s the tupenny ha’penny belief that dullness is respectable. Hasn’t she some Italian blood? Now Joan—my wretched daughter—simply revels in dowdiness. She’s only happy in a jersey or Girl Guides rubbish. She’s at Cheltenham, mixing with the British flapper. When she’s at home she drives me into painting my face and putting dyed attire on my head. If I had to live with Margot I shouldn’t wear anything gayer than taupe.”
He stared out at Margot whose pink frock revolved above her gleaming silver buckles on the crushed shell of the walk. Olive saw his face light, attaining for the second a holy glow. It was a window in the wall of dark night. He looked and doted. The woman wondered at him. He had all the breathless beauty of a child facing its dearest toy. His grey eyes dilated. In her own eyes she felt the dry threat of tears and said, “Old man, I’m sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a dear and because you’re a pariah. I don’t know that all this garden party petting is good for our player folk but—over in your wilderness—no one seems to investigate the stage except professors and the police. It must be sickening.... What’ll become of Margot when she’s grown up?”
It had begun to worry him on the Cedric. He loosely thought that her friends from Miss Thorne’s school would be kind to her. Wouldn’t they? He said, “She’s only ten, Olive,” and sat brooding. It wasn’t fair. Smart society, the decorous women of small gestures, hadn’t any use for him. He looked at Olive who wrote letters to him and called him old man. She wrote books. She knew all the world. She had been to the king’s court and laughed about it. He went to shelter in her strange kindness and sighed, “It isn’t fair. She ought to have—she ought to go anywhere she wants to.”
“She probably will if there’s anything in eyelashes,” said Olive, “and Gurdy will go anywhere he wants to, by the shape of his jaw. I’ve been dissecting American society with horrific interest. It seems to have reached a lower level than British! You haven’t even an intelligent Bohemia.”
“There ain’t many literary people,” Mark reflected, “and they mostly seem to live in Philadelphia and Indiana, anyhow. Or over here. What’s a man to do? I can’t—”
“You can’t do anything. Whistle the children in. There’s a one man show. Stage settings. Italian. I haven’t seen them and you should.” She threw the stick of paint away and set about cheering him. She liked him, muddled in his trade, labouring after beauty, unaware of his own odd sweetness. She gave up the last weeks of the season, guiding him about London, watching him glow when Margot wanted a scarf of orange silk in Liberty’s, when Gurdy demonstrated his Latin, not badly, before a tomb in Saint Paul’s. Margot was the obvious idol, something to be petted and dressed. But the child had a rich attraction of her own, graces of placid curves, a quiet loveliness that missed stupidity.
“You don’t like Margot,” Olive told Gurdy in a waste of the British Museum.
The boy lied, “Of course I do,” in his cracked voice but Olive took that as the product of good schooling, like his easy performance of airs on the piano. He was jealous of Margot and showed it so often that the woman wondered why Mark didn’t see. But this wasn’t the usual boy.