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It was a call from Long Island, where Aunt Althea Balbian was summering. The servants had learned of Lilla's whereabouts from the Brassfields. Aunt Althea had fallen seriously ill in the night. Parr showed his downcast eyelids and lantern jaws in the doorway. "A maid is here from madam's house downtown with a steamer trunk and three suitcases."
Miss Althea Balbian redoubled her efforts to form Lilla according to her most exalted ideas; and, as a result, she implanted in that little charge still more complexities of impulse a greater sensitiveness to the lures of mortal beauty, together with something of her own recoil from all the ultimate consequences of that sensitiveness.
And her tragic little face her eyes, skin, and fluffy hair all harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown resembled the face of some European grande amoureuse seen through the small end of an opera glass. "Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat in her library drinking tea from old china cups. "Lilla is a strange, I may say a startling, child."
But this "early-American" effect was adulterated by objects that Miss Balbian had acquired on her travels, such as medieval chalices, coffers covered with vellum and encrusted with jewels, and a few authenticated paintings from that period when the men of Italy, at a breath of inspiration from the Athenian tomb, perceived, instead of the glamour of a celestial paradise, the gorgeousness of this world.
So one day, when Lilla was six years old, the drawing-room suddenly blossomed with white roses. Next morning the orphan was taken away by Aunt Althea Balbian to another house, on lower Fifth Avenue. Miss Balbian's house provided an appropriate setting for its pale, aristocratic, chastely fervent owner.
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