“D’you really feel that we’ve any business telling the French what to do with their own homes?”
“But Fontainebleau could be made into a real home, Corpril!”
“So could Mount Vernon.”
“It’s too small. Fontainebleau’s so huge. All those rooms.”
“You don’t think that it’s any use just letting it stay beautiful?”
“But it isn’t really beautiful,” the young woman retorted, “It’s so much of it Renaissance, you know?”
He was still hating this vacuity when the taxicab left him at Mrs. Ilden’s house in Chelsea. The butler told him that “Lady Ilden” was not at home and guided him through grey halls to a bedroom. Gurdy washed, tried to recall Ilden’s rank in the British navy and the name of Olive’s last novel. He strolled downstairs and met Margot in the lower hall without knowing it. He saw a slim person in stark yellow reading a letter and was startled when the girl said, “Good God, they didn’t tell me you’d got here! Come and help me stick this holly about in the library.”
She thrust a bowl filled with small sprays of holly into his hands and frowned between the wings of her black, bobbed hair. He remembered her plump. She was slender. She still wore glittering pumps with silver buckles. When she chuckled it was in the former chime. She exclaimed, “Of course! Uncle Eddie was born in Norway, wasn’t he?”
“I think dad was born in the steerage, coming over,” Gurdy said.
“You’re not at all American, anyhow,” she announced, “and that’s a relief. I’m quite mad about Scandinavians. Only sensible people in Europe. Come along. There’s a rehearsal in half a minute and—”