“I hope so,” said Sheila, not very warmly.
“Until you get better acquainted with your husband’s friends you will feel rather lonely at being left as at present, I suppose.”
“It is a silly thing altogether. If men smoked after dinner I could understand it. But they merely sit, looking at wine they don’t drink, talking a few commonplaces and yawning.”
“They don’t do it everywhere. But here we keep to the manners and customs of the ancients.”
“What do you know about the manners of the ancients?” said Mrs. Kavanagh, tapping her daughter’s shoulder as she passed with a sheet of music.
“I have studied them frequently, mamma,” said the daughter with composure, “in the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens.”
The mamma smiled, and passed on to place the music on the piano. Sheila did not understand what her companion had said; and indeed Mrs. Lorraine immediately turned, with the same calm, fair face and fearless eyes, to ask Sheila whether she would not, by and by, sing one of those Northern songs of which Mr. Lavender had told her.
A tall girl with her back hair tied in a knot and her costume copied from a well-known pre-Raphaelite drawing, sat down to the piano and sang a mystic song of the present day, in which the moon, the stars and other natural objects behaved strangely, and were somehow mixed up with the appeal of a maiden who demanded that her dead lover should be reclaimed from the sea.
“Do you ever go down to your husband’s studio?” said Mrs. Lorraine.
She glanced toward the lady at the piano.
“Oh, you may talk,” said Mrs. Lorraine, with the least expression of contempt in her gray eyes. “She is singing to gratify herself, not us.”
“Yes, I sometimes go down,” said Sheila in as low a voice as she could manage without falling into a whisper, “and it is such a dismal place. It is very hard on him to have to work in a big bare room like that, with the windows half blinded. But sometimes I think Frank would rather have me out of the way.”
“And what would he do if both of us were to pay him a visit?” said Mrs. Lorraine. “I should so like to see the studio! Won’t you call for me some day and take me with you?”
Take her with her, indeed! Sheila began to wonder that she did not propose to go alone. Fortunately, there was no need to answer the question, for at this moment the song came to an end, and there was a general movement and murmur of gratitude.