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The lady I looked upon, and as to whom my friend, again quite at sea, appealed to me for a formula, was as little a Holbein, or a specimen of any other school, as she was, like Lady Beldonald herself, a Titian. The formula was easy to give, for the amusement was that her prettiness yes, literally, prodigiously, her prettiness was distinct.
He had lost her, and I saw I had made a mistake. She's the greatest of all the great Holbeins." I was relieved. "Ah then not Lady Beldonald! But do I possess a Holbein of any price unawares?" "There she is there she is! Dear, dear, dear, what a head!"
Lady Beldonald uncontrollably murmured. "Don't be afraid we shall fight for her," I returned with a laugh for this tone. Mrs. Brash was still where I could see her without appearing to stare, and she mightn't have seen I was looking at her, though her protectress, I'm afraid, could scarce have failed of that certainty.
But I had suggested something else to my friend, who appeared for a moment detached. "Should you say she'll hate her worse if she doesn't see?" "Lady Beldonald? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than if she does? Ah I give that up!" I laughed. "But what I can tell you is why I hold that, as I said just now, we can do most.
But two things, simultaneously with this and with each other, struck me with force; one of them the truth of Outreau's description of her, the other the fact that the person bringing her could only have been Lady Beldonald. She was a Holbein of the first water; yet she was also Mrs. Brash, the imported "foil," the indispensable "accent," the successor to the dreary Miss Dadd!
But while she lived at least and it was with an intensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which she had never dreamed Lady Beldonald herself faced the music. This is what I mean by the possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever so long as the ordeal lasted.
Munden's tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she "oughtn't" was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. "She hasn't got on." "What's the matter with her?" "Well, to begin with, she's American." "But I thought that was the way of ways to get on." "It's one of them. But it's one of the ways of being awfully out of it too. There are so many!"
The position offered her by Lady Beldonald was moreover exactly what she needed; widowed also, after many troubles and reverses, with her fortune of the smallest, and her various children either buried or placed about, she had never had time or means to visit England, and would really be grateful in her declining years for the new experience and the pleasant light work involved in her cousin's hospitality.
Lady Beldonald had been magnificent had been almost intelligent. Miss What's-her-name continues pretty, continues even young, and doesn't matter a straw! She matters so ideally little that Lady Beldonald is practically safer, I judge, than she has ever been. There hasn't been a symptom of chatter about this person, and I believe her protectress is much surprised that we're not more struck.
She was stupefied at learning that I had just in my ardour proposed to its proprietress to sit to me. Only she came round promptly which Lady Beldonald really never did. Mrs.
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