“You are not the first of your sex that has said so.”
“And I most sincerely hope I shall not be the last,” said Jimmie, with a little flush and a little flash in his eyes and the politest of little bows. Whereupon Mrs. Hardacre bit her lip and hated him. Norma, seizing the opportunity of contributing to the final rout of her mother, unwittingly did Jimmie some damage.
“We women ought not to have given up fancy work,” she said in her hardest and most artificial tones. “As we don't embroider with our fingers, we embroider with our tongues. You can have no idea what an elaborate tissue of lies has been woven about that poor little Mrs. Hewson. I agree with Mr. Padgate. I am sorry you believe them, mother.”
Jimmie's grateful glance smote her undeserving heart. She had gained credit under false pretences and felt hypocritical—an unpleasant feeling, for the assumption of unpossessed virtues was not one of her faults. She succeeded, however, in rendering her mother furious. In a very short time Mrs. Hardacre remembered an engagement and went away in a hansom-cab, refusing the seat in Connie's carriage, which was put at her disposal on the condition of her waiting a few moments longer. She had thanked Jimmie, however, for the pleasure afforded by his delightful pictures with such politeness when he saw her into the cab, that he did not for a moment suspect that the lady who had entered the house with expressions of friendliness had driven away in a rage, with feelings towards him ludicrously hostile. He returned to the studio at peace with all womankind; not sorry that Mrs. Hardacre had departed, but only because courtesy no longer demanded his relegating to the second sphere of his attention the divine personage of whom he felt himself to be the slave. No suspicion of Mrs. Hardacre's spiteful motive in deprecating the display of his most striking piece of portraiture ever entered his head. He ran down the studio stairs with the eagerness of a boy released from the flattering but embarrassing society of his elders and free to enjoy the companionship of his congeners. And he was childishly eager to show his pictures to Norma, to hear her verdict, to secure her approval, so that he should stand in her eyes as a person in some humble way worthy of the regard that Morland said she bestowed on him.
He found his visitors not looking at pictures at all, but talking to Aline, who rushed to him as soon as he entered the studio.
“Oh, Jimmie—just fancy! Mrs. Deering is going to take me to Horlingham on Saturday, and is coming upstairs with me to see what I can do in the way of a frock. You don't mind, do you?”
Jimmie looked down into the happy young face and laughed a happy laugh.
“Mrs. Deering is an angel from the most exclusive part of heaven,” he said. And this was one of the rare occasions on which he was guilty of a double meaning. Had not the angel thus contrived an unlooked-for joy—a few minutes' undisturbed communion with his divinity?
The first words that Norma spoke when they were alone were an apology.
“You must not take what my mother said in ill part. She and I have been bred, I'm afraid, in a hard school.”