to apply her categories—who had a large studio where he gave teas and painted small, disagreeable pictures. They were clever pictures; Mrs. Delafield was aware of this, though Tim and Frances saw them only as disagreeable; and the young man, if bad, was clever. Mrs. Delafield had travelled up to town several times in this emergency, and had even accompanied Rhoda to the studio, where a young lady with bare legs and feet was dancing, with more concentration than spontaneity, before a cigaretted audience. Oddly enough, after this visit, it had been much easier to make Rhoda give up Mr. Austin Dell than it had been to make her give up the stage. Mrs. Delafield had merely talked him over, very mildly, him and his friends, asking here and there a kindly question about one or a slightly perplexed question about another. It had been Rhoda herself who had expressed awareness of the second-rate flavour that had brooded so heavily over dancer and audience, not leaving Mr. Dell himself untouched. On the point of Mr. Dell’s income Mrs. Delafield soon felt that Rhoda knew misgivings—misgivings as to her own fitness to be a needy artist’s wife. She made no overt recantation, but over her tea, presently, agreed with her aunt that it was a pity to dance with bare feet unless the feet were flawlessly well-shaped. “She is such a little fool, that Miss Matthews!” Rhoda had remarked. And after this there was no more talk of Mr. Dell.
II
WHEN, in the second year of the war, poor Tim and Frances, dusty, jaded, nearly shattered, but appeased at last, were able to announce the engagement of their daughter Rhoda to the unexceptionable Niel Quentyn, Mrs. Delafield’s special function seemed ended; but, looking back over her long intercourse with her niece, she knew that Rhoda had felt her a relief rather than an influence; that she had made things easier rather than more difficult to her; that, in short, she had always successfully appealed to the girl’s intelligence rather than to what poor Tim and Frances called her better self; and it was of Rhoda’s intelligence, and of what possible pressure she might be able to bring to bear upon it, that she thought finally, as she worked at her border and waited for the fly that was to bring Rhoda’s baby and its nurse from the station.
She had not been able to rejoice with her brother and his wife over Rhoda’s match. She who had measured, during her years of acquaintanceship with her, her niece’s force, had measured accurately, in her first glance at him, Niel’s insignificance. He was good-looking, good-tempered, and very much in love; but caste, clothes, code, and the emotion of his age and situation summed him up. He had money, too, and could give Rhoda, together with a little handle to her name, the dim, rich, startling drawing-room in which her taste at once expressed itself, and a pleasant country house, where, as he confided to Mrs. Delafield, he hoped to inspire her, when the war was over, with his own ardour for hunting.
Rhoda was far too clever to quarrel with such excellent bread and butter; but what could he give her more? for Rhoda would want more than bread and butter; what food for excitement and adventure could he offer her indolent yet eager mind and her nature, at once so greedy and so fastidious? Mrs. Delafield asked herself the question, even while she watched Rhoda’s wonderful white form move up the nave at her splendid, martial wedding; even while poor Frances wept for joy and “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden” surged from the organ; and she feared that Niel was getting far more than he had bargained for and Rhoda far less.
The first year, it was true, passed successfully. Poor Frances, who had, fortunately, died at the end of it, had known no reason for abated rejoicing. She lived long enough to see the baby, little Jane Amoret, as Rhoda persisted in calling the child; and she had welcomed Niel home once on leave—Niel as much infatuated as ever and trying to take an intelligent interest in Picasso. It was since then, during the past year, that Tim’s letters had expressed a growing presage and appeal. Moved by the latter, and only a short time before her own grief had overtaken her, she had gone up to London and stayed with him for a few days, and had taken tea with Rhoda.
At Rhoda’s it had been exactly as she expected. The drawing-room was worthy of its fame; so worthy that Mrs. Delafield wondered how Niel afforded it—and in war-time, too. Rhoda, as she often announced, was clever at picking up things, and many of the objects with which she had surrounded herself were undoubted trophies of her resource and knowledge. But all the taste and skill in the world didn’t give one that air of pervading splendour, as of the setting for a Russian ballet, in which the red lacquer and the Chinese screens, the blacks and golds and rich, dim whites were, like Rhoda herself, sunken with her customary air of gloomy mirth in the deepest cushions and surpassingly dressed, merged in the soft, unstressed, yet magnificent atmosphere. It was the practical side of matters—the depth of good, dull Niel’s purse measured against the depth of Rhoda’s atmosphere—that alarmed Mrs. Delafield, rather than Rhoda herself and Rhoda’s friends, of whom poor Tim had so distressingly written.
There were many suave and merry young men, mainly in khaki, and various ladies, acute or languorous, who had the air of being as carefully selected as the chairs and china. There were tea and cigarettes, and an abundance of wonderful talk that showed no sign of mitigation on account of her mid-Victorian presence; though, as Mrs. Delafield reflected, musing on the young people about her, no one could say, except their clever selves, how much mitigation there might not be. Like Rhoda, no doubt, they felt her reality through her mid-Victorianism. Her small black bonnet with its velvet strings, and her long, loose jacket trimmed with fringe, would not restrain them beyond a certain point. Yet she suspected that they had a point, and she wondered, though the question did not alarm her, where it could be placed.
They talked, at all events, and she listened; at times she even smiled; and since by no possibility could her smiles be taken as complicities, she was willing that they should be taken as comprehensions. Rhoda’s friends, though so young, were chill and arid, and the enthusiasms they allowed themselves had the ring of provocation rather than of ardour. Yet she did not dislike them; they were none of them like Mr. Dell; and, though so withered by sophistication, they had at moments flashes of an uncanny, almost an ingenuous wisdom.
The occasion had not alarmed her, and she had found but one moment oppressive, that of the appearance—the displayal, as of a Chinese idol, indeed, or a Pekinese spaniel (Rhoda had three of these)—of poor little Jane Amoret. She rarely disliked her niece, even when feeling her most naughty; but she found herself disliking her calculated maternity, with its kisses, embraces and reiterated “darlings.” Jane Amoret had eyed her gravely and, as gravely, had held out her arms to her nurse to be taken back when the spectacle was over. Jane Amoret’s attire was quite as strange as her mother’s drawing-room, and Rhoda had contrived to make her look like a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley and a gorgeous, dressed-up doll Madonna in a Spanish cathedral.
On returning to Tim, Mrs. Delafield found that she could not completely reassure him, but she laid stress, knowing it would be, comparatively, a comfort, on Rhoda’s extravagance, eliciting from him a groan of “I know!—I know!—Poor Niel’s been writing to me about it!—Dances; dinners; gowns. One would say she had no conscience at all—and at a time like this!” But he went on, “That’s nothing, though. That can be managed when Niel gets back—if he ever does, poor fellow!—and can put his foot down on the spot. You didn’t see him, then? He wasn’t there—the young man?”
Tim had never before spoken definitely of a young man.
“The young man?” she questioned. “There were a dozen of them. Of course, she’ll have a special one: that’s part of the convention. Rhoda may cultivate—like all the rest of them—every appearance of lawless attachment; but you may be sure, dear Tim, that it’s only a pose, a formula, like the painted lips and dyed hair, which doesn’t in the least mean they are demi-mondaines.”
“Painted lips? Dyed hair? Demi-mondaines?” Tim had wanly echoed. “Do you really mean, Isabel, that Rhoda paints and dyes?”
“Not
