“It is because Christina is so used to seeing George every day,” said I. “Peter Ball is very different, isn’t he?”
Mother said that there was no accounting for tastes, and that for her part she considered George’s type was the nicest. But whatever we did, she said, we were not to chaff Christina about it, and put her off a very good match. A girl of Christina’s sort never took kindly to chaff, and though she should be sorry to lose Christina as a secretary to George, it being impossible to tell what sort of minx he might engage in her place, she for one wouldn’t like any personal consideration whatever to interfere with Christina’s establishment in life. Peter Ball is a landed gentry. He is M.F.H. in the county of Northumberland to the Rattenraw Hunt, and a capital shot and first-rate angler. When his old mother dies he will be richer, but he is a good son, and often stays with her in Leinster Gardens where he has asked me and Christina to go to tea next week.
I promised not to chaff, but if she had only known, it would have taken a steam-crane to put Christina off that particular thing. She talked lots about Peter. He was the “finest specimen of humanity she had ever come across!” “Such a contrast to the little anæmic, effete, ambisextrous (I hope I have got it right?) creatures that haunt Cinque Cento House, who are all trying to get more out of their heads than is in them!” “Greek in his simplicity, a sort of mixture of John Bull and Antinöus!” I say, just wait till you see his mother; nice men’s mothers are sometimes sad eye-openers, and Peter Ball is always talking about his. Also it is quite on the cards that she may not like Christina, and then I am sure he will never propose to her. He is an admirable son. I believe he keeps a gramophone just to attract the girls he admires into his mother’s cave, and give her the opportunity of looking over them, and making up her mind if they are fit to be her Peter’s wife or no.
When the eventful day came, Christina was on thorns. She didn’t know how to dress. She finally left off the chiffon bag and wore a fringe-net, and her best-cut “tailor-made,” and took out her ear-rings lest they should damn her in his mother’s eyes. Then at exactly five minutes to four we rang the bell in 1000 Leinster Square.
A proud butler opened the door. George will only let us have maids, although he could afford ten butlers.
The house was beautiful, and not a bit like ours. “Early Victorian,” Christina whispered me. She was dreadfully nervous, and made me too. I dropped my umbrella in the rack with such a clatter that she blushed and scolded me. Then a palm-leaf tickled my head as I went by, and I begged its pardon, thinking some one behind was trying to attract my attention. We were taken into a big room with pedestal things in gold and stucco set down at intervals, and a clock with a bare pendulum which looks simply undressed to me, and a bronze Father Time with his sickle lying lazily across the top. On another clock there was a gilt man in a gilt cart whipping up two gilt horses. The carpet had large bouquets of roses on it, and I thought what a good game it would be to pretend they were islands and hop across from one to the other. I began, but she stopped me. In a corner was the gramophone, like a great brass ear put out to hear what you were saying. It was playing when we went in, like an old man with a wheeze, and in came Peter Ball looking as if he had just got out of a bath, and said, “How-do-you-do! it is playing ‘Coppelia.’” Then it played “Valse Bleue” and “Casey at the Wake,” and “Casey as Doctor,” and “When other Lips,” and then Peter Ball said his mother was ready.
Into another room we went, full of Berlin wool-work chairs, and screens of Potiphar and his wife, and the curtains were of green rep with ropes of silk to tie them back and gilt festoons to hide their beginnings, and an old old lady in a big arm-chair and a lace cap with nodding bugles was in a corner, just like another and older bit of furniture.
We were introduced; she was very deaf and very blind, and I am not sure she didn’t think I was the girl Peter wanted to marry. However that might be, she seemed pleased with us, and we talked of her son and the house. Christina, who used to say she preferred a Chéret poster to a Titian, and plain deal to mahogany, admired everything freely. The rosewood wheelbarrow with silver fittings given to Peter Ball’s father when he laid a first stone somewhere, she said was superb and so graceful; the picture of old Mrs. Ball by Ingres in a poke bonnet and short waist she said was far superior to anything by Burne Jones.
“Who is Burne Jones?” said the old lady, and Christina denied Burne Jones cheerfully. I thought of my favourite piece of poetry—
“See, ye Ladies that are coy,
What the mighty Love can do!”