“I say, Dan, can you put a label on that fine piece of statuary talking over there to Tom Hornsby?”
“That, my lord, surely you ought to know—ha! ha! ha! What an ingrate you are! it is Lady Ranelagh. She who reigned over London Society by right of her beauty.”
“By right of position, you might add, dear Mephisto.”
“And finally, my lord, by right of insolence,” interrupted the little buffoon.
“She frequently argued with life like a fishwife,” went on Lionel, “and few know as well as I do what funny questions she put to destiny; yet she never saw her true image in her mental mirror, and Society never recoiled from her; but as you know, Dan, Society never recoils from any of her members: the contract between swindlers and swindled is never broken, and if by any chance some speck of dirt sticks to one of the columns that support the social edifice, Society is always ready to pay the costs of whitewash.”
“Yet, my lord, this Carmen of Mayfair is now caught in the wheels of the inevitable, and she has to face to-day the worst of all judges—nature.”
“Do you see that little Tanagra figure leaning against the door?—there, just in front of you, Danford.”
“You mean Lady Hurlingham, my lord, with her vermilion cheeks framed in meretriciously youthful curls. She is a thorough woman of the world.”
“With her, my dear Danford, a man is quite safe. She did everything from curiosity, which enabled her to reappear unwrinkled and unsullied after her varied experience; she derived all the fun she could extract from life without singeing the smallest feather of her wings.”
“And still, my lord, one could hardly dare to whisper an indelicate word before that Greuzelike visage.”
“Quite so, dear Mephisto; those red lips would rather kiss than tell, those large melting eyes are pure—to an uninformed observer. _Honi soit_—ha! ha! ha!”
The sarcastic laughter of the two men was drowned by the tuning of a beautiful Stradivarius, and for a moment the rising uproar of a London At Home was hushed.
Johann Staub stood near the piano, his long brown hair framing a strong Teutonic face, his deep, dark eyes roving over the mass of heads turned towards him. He played magnificently, electric vibrations ran through his leonine mane, still, they hardly listened; the silence that had followed his first bars of the Kreuzer Sonata was soon broken, as voices one by one resumed their interrupted chatting, and the Dowager Lady Pendelton, lulled by the heat and the scent of exotic flowers, let her senile chin drop on her wrinkled breast. She was asleep. Staub ended his Sonata, and loud applause broke loose, a kind of thanksgiving applause, not in honour of the superb way in which the artist had played, but to celebrate their relief and satisfaction at his having finished. Old women went up to him, pressed his hands, asked him to luncheon, to dinner—would they were young—to what would they not invite him! The one had heard Paganini—“Psh! he was no match to you.” Another had known Beriot very well—he was the only one to whom he could be compared. Lady Pendelton woke suddenly, gave a few approving grunts, her eyes still shut, while she struck the parquet with her ebony stick. She wanted Mrs Webster to bring Staub to her at once, as she would like her granddaughter, Lady Augusta, to have some violin lessons.