"Society," returned her cousin, "is not allowed to stand for cream now. It is stirred up with a spoon, silver-gilt, and the skim milk gets hopelessly mixed up with the cream. That young man who is now talking to the actress person is not what he looks. He is, as a matter of fact, the scion of a noble house, who models in clay atrociously."
"And the gorgeous person he is turning his back upon?"
And Miss Mazerod broke off into a happy laugh. Hers was not the bitterness of plainness or insignificance, but something infinitely more suggestive. It was, indeed, not bitterness at all, but light-hearted contempt, which is, perhaps, the deepest contempt there is.
"Who is the wretched woman with no backbone draped in rusty black?" asked Dora.
"My dear! That is one of the great lady artists of the age. She lectures to factory girls or something, and she paints limp females snuffling over tiger-lilies. Her ideal woman has that sort of droop of the throat--I imagine she-tries to teach it to the factory. She objects to backbone."
Miss Mazerod, who possessed a very firm little specimen of the adjunct mentioned, drew herself up and smiled commiseratingly.
"Then," said Dora, "I feel quite consoled about my sketches."
For the first time Miss Mazerod looked serious.
"Dora," she said, "I often wonder whether it would be profane to mention in one's prayers a little gratitude for not having an artistic soul. There are lots of women like that in the world, especially in London. They pretend that they think themselves superior to men, but they know in their hearts that they are inferior to women. For they have not something that women ought to have--No, Dolly, no brown studies here; you must not dream here!"
Dora, with a light laugh, came back from her mental wanderings to find herself looking at a face which caught her attention at once. It was the face of a man--brown, self-contained, with unhappy eyes and a long drooping nose.
"Who is _that_ man?" she inquired at once. "Now, he is quite different from the rest. He is about the only person who is not furtively finding out how much attention he has succeeded in attracting."
"I don't know; I shouldn't think any one knows."
Miss Mazerod was looking at the mechanism of her fan with a demure expression on lips shaped for happiness. A dark young man was elbowing his way through the mixed crowd towards them.