“Let her alone, Anne. These feather moods need a south wind.”
His lofty compunction repelled her more than her mother’s brusque contempt. The atmosphere of the room seemed overburdened with a sensuous flavor. The very roses suggested a rank and vivid worldliness, a fulsomeness of the flesh gotten of meat and wine.
She rose, pushing back her chair, with a languid drooping of the lids.
“Tell Jael to have supper sent to my room. Shall you be late to-night?”
Her face was turned toward her mother, as though the gentleman in the periwig were a mere negligible shadow.
“Go to bed, child, and don’t trouble your head about healthy people. Nell is at The King’s to-night. I wish you could catch some of the wench’s devil.”
“Oh—the Drury Lane woman! I have seen her at her window in her night-dress shouting at Moll Davis in the next house. She looked something of a drab with her hair done up in papers. Do the candles make such a difference?”
She looked listlessly over her shoulder at my lord, her lassitude giving her an air of tired vacuity. And the smile he gave her might have been the smile he would have given to a credulous child.
“We are all moths, coz, when the candles are lit. Which is a riddle that you need not be bothered with.”
Her going relieved the two worldlings from an uncongenial feeling of oppression, and yet some uneasiness of spirit remained to trouble both. Miss Barbara had chilled the room for them with her wraithlike and sinister sickliness. The sleek self-content of the well-fed animal had been disturbed by impressions and by thoughts that neither cared to analyze. My Lord of Gore stood at the window, stroking his periwig with some such dissatisfaction on his face as he might have betrayed at the first hint that he was growing old.