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He blew into her arid parlour the long-awaited whiff from the golden fields of "society." So, up to the very hour of the Gibbons dinner, she sang his praises in Preciosa's ear. Preciosa was preparing to revert; she sought the soil, but she was determined it should be the soil of her own choosing. She found Morrell coarse, dry, hard, sandy, gritty.
The servant who opened the door was all at sea; obscure sounds of sobbing came from somewhere above; and when Euphrosyne finally washed in she was like the ocean half-subsided after a storm. She had just learned that Preciosa had refused Robin Morrell. "Such a caller at such a time!" she had articulated over Eudoxia's card. It took away half the sweetness of the triumph.
This, her first intrusion into the strange, rich world of art, had rather impressed her, after all; such novel hospitality really required some acknowledgment. "Do," said Virgilia, now in quite a gale. "Don't drink his tea for nothing! And if it's 'ideas' that are wanted," she went on, as she grasped Preciosa lightly by both shoulders and gave her a humorous shake, "this is the shop!"
How glad I am that I can now look at her through my spectacles. "I feared least some instinct should warn me to beware. I escaped from her arms, and ran home and seized the glasses, and bounded back again to Preciosa. As I entered the room I was heated, my head was swimming with confused apprehensions, my eyes must have glared.
"Well then, let us go in, Preciosa," said her companion, "you know more than a witch." The old gipsy also encouraged them to go in, and that decided the question. As soon as they had entered the room, the cavalier of the order, seeing the paper which Preciosa carried, stretched out his hand to take it.
Preciosa left the room by another door, and Morrell walked close beside her. He looked about the crowded place with an air that was both determined and desperate. People here, there, everywhere; the rabble swarmed in the library, the morning-room, the den, chattering, staring, gaping, wondering. It was disgusting, it was barbarous, it made matters impossible.
Preciosa was bewildered, not knowing why she had made all those investigations, and was still more surprised when the lady raised her in her arms, and gave her not one kiss, but a hundred.
"Certainly not," said Elizabeth promptly, and put the matter out of her mind for once and for all. After Morrell had imposed himself upon the men he turned his attention to the women. Virgilia had always impressed him as a trifle meagre and acidulous, and Elizabeth Gibbons had never impressed him at all; but he instantly caught at the flamboyant and high-charged beauty of little Preciosa McNulty.
Virgilia, having already resumed her customary facial expression, now took on her usual self-contained manner as well and crossed over to them. "Well, well, Virgilia," said her aunt, as the door closed on Preciosa, "you see more in that girl than I do." "I see her grandfather," whispered Virgilia, with the obscure brevity of an oracle.
Really, she was too young for so much poise, too "temperamental," by every indication of her physiognomy, for such complete self-control. "I say, she has a very good tone, do you know," he took occasion to remark to Dill. And he spoke as a man whose authority in such delicate matters was beyond dispute. There is only one way to impress the pusher, and that way Preciosa had unconsciously taken.