He indicated Etta still blushing into whose ear Tommy whispered that his uncle always spoke like a penny book with the covers off.
“My dear man,” said Clementina, “stick me anywhere, so long as it’s next the baby and I can see that nobody feeds her on anchovies and lobster salad.”
She understood perfectly. The second seat of honour was Mrs. Fontaine’s. She confounded Mrs. Fontaine. But what was Mrs. Fontaine to her or she to Mrs. Fontaine?
They took their places at the round table laid for eight. On Quixtus’s right, Etta; on his left, Mrs. Fontaine; then Sheila, somewhat awed at the grown-up luncheon party and squeezing Pinkie very tight so as to give her courage; then Clementina with Huckaby as left-hand neighbour; then Lady Louisa, and Tommy next to Etta.
Clementina kept her word and behaved with great civility. Tommy politely addressed Lady Louisa to the immense relief of Huckaby, who thus temporarily freed from his Martha, plunged into eager conversation with Clementina about her picture in the Salon, which had attracted considerable attention. He did not tell her that, in order to refresh his memory of the masterpiece, he had revisited the Grand Palais that morning. He praised the technique. There was in it that hint of Velasquez which so many portrait-painters tried for and so few got. This pleased Clementina. Velasquez was the god of her art. One bright space in her dreary youth was her life with Velasquez in Madrid.
“I too once tried to know something about him,” said Huckaby. “I wrote a monograph—a wretched compilation only—in a series of Lives of Great Painters for a firm of publishers.”
Hack work or not, the authorship of a Life of Velasquez was enough to prejudice her in Huckaby’s favour. She learned, too, that he was a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a university contemporary of Quixtus. Huckaby, finding her not the rough-tongued virago from whom Quixtus had always shrunk, and of whom, at their one meeting in the tea-room, he, himself, had not received the suavest impression, but a frank, intelligent woman, gradually forgot his anxiety to please and talked naturally as became a man of his scholarship. The result was that Clementina thought him a pleasant and sensible fellow, an opinion which she expressed later in the day to Quixtus.
With regard to Mrs. Fontaine, her promise of ladylike behaviour was harder to keep. All through the meal her dislike grew stronger. That Quixtus should bend towards Etta, in his courtly fashion, and pay her little gallant attentions, was but natural; indeed it was charming courtesy towards Tommy’s betrothed; but that he should do the same to Mrs. Fontaine and add to it a subtle shade of intimacy, was exasperating. In the lady’s attitude, too, towards Quixtus, Clementina perceived an air of proprietorship, a triumphant consciousness of her powers of fascination. When Quixtus addressed a remark across the table to Clementina, Mrs. Fontaine adroitly drew his attention to herself. Her manner gave Clementina to understand that, although a frump of a portrait painter might be an important person in a studio, yet in the big world outside, the attractive woman had victorious pre-eminence. Now Clementina was a woman, and one whose nature had lately gone through unusual convulsions. She found it difficult to be polite to Mrs. Fontaine. Only once was there a tiny eruption of the volcano.
Sheila’s seat at the table being too low for her small body, Clementina demanded a cushion from the maître d’hôtel. When, after some delay, a waiter brought it, she was engaged in talk with Huckaby. She turned in time to see Mrs. Fontaine about to lift Sheila from her seat. With a sudden, rough movement she all but snatched the child out of the other’s arms, and herself saw to Sheila’s sedentary comfort.
She didn’t care what Quixtus or any one else thought of her. She was not going to have this alien woman touch her child. The hussy flirtation with Quixtus she could not prevent. But no woman born of woman should come between her and the beloved child of her adoption.