“However, there can’t be a man concealed in your mind, you are too transparent,—I should have known it, and helped matters nicely to a focus for you. Yet the copy-books used to say ‘still waters run deep’; who knows, innocent-looking mountain Brooke, but there is a great, deep, still swimming pool somewhere in your mind!”
“Bless me, she is teasable after all!” ejaculated Lucy, for, while she was still gabbling, Brooke had left her, slipped through the portières, held apart by two footmen, given her name to a third, shaken her hostess cordially by the hand, and after carefully giving her mother’s message of regret, melted away in the crowd.
“Charming girl, that Miss Lawton,” was Mrs. Parks’s mental comment. “I guess, after all, there is something in having a well-bred-to-the-bone mother. Three hundred people have squeezed my fingers already this afternoon and murmured all sorts of things, while they either gazed over my head or at my gown. She is the first one that looked at _me_ and as if she meant what she said, or would really do me a good turn if she could.” And the Senator’s ambitious wife gazed after Brooke rather wistfully.
Escaping from the ballroom, where, in spite of all possible care, the hothouse heat and heavy odour of flowers, together with the mild afternoon, made the air stifling, Brooke was guided by instinct toward the picture gallery. In the reception hall back of the stairs, concealed by a rose-covered screen, a Russian orchestra, the latest novelty, was playing; but as the first strains of the concert floated from the music room, the intended effect was lost and became wholly discordant and bewildering.
Once inside the doors, for the picture gallery was separated from the house itself not only by a short passageway, curtained at both ends, but by doors of richly carved antique oak, Brooke found herself in another world, in which two more of the liveried regiment and she herself were the only inhabitants. One of the men took from a Japanese stand of bronze, by which he was stationed, a long satin-covered book, that proved to be a catalogue of the paintings in the gallery. A photogravure of each one filled the left-hand page, a few words relating to the artist facing it.