She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed “nerves” like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.  Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the floor irritably.  But even in that display there was something exquisitely delicate.  The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.

“What nonsense!  A Blunt doesn’t hire himself.”

“Some princely families,” I said, “were founded by men who have done that very thing.  The great Condottieri, you know.”

It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that we were not living in the fifteenth century.  She gave me also to understand with some spirit that there was no question here of founding a family.  Her son was very far from being the first of the name.  His importance lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room tone, “in our Civil War.”

She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful white eyebrows.  For she was growing old!  Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.

CHAPTER III

Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden illumination.  I said to myself confidently that these two people had been quarrelling all the morning.  I had discovered the secret of my invitation to that lunch.  They did not care to face the strain of some obstinate, inconclusive discussion for fear, maybe, of it ending in a serious quarrel.  And so they had agreed that I should be fetched downstairs to create a diversion.  I cannot say I felt annoyed.  I didn’t care.  My perspicacity did not please me either.  I wished they had left me alone—­but nothing mattered.  They must have been in their superiority accustomed to make use of people, without compunction.  From necessity, too.  She especially.  She lived by her wits.  The silence had grown so marked that I had at last to raise my eyes; and the first thing I observed was that Captain Blunt was no longer to be seen in the garden.  Must have gone indoors.  Would rejoin us in a moment.  Then I would leave mother and son to themselves.

The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended upon the mother of the last of his race.  But these terms, irritation, mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her.  It is impossible to give an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all her transformations.  She smiled faintly at me.

“But all this is beside the point.  The real point is that my son, like all fine natures, is a being of strange contradictions which the trials of life have not yet reconciled in him.  With me it is a little different.  The trials fell mainly to my share—­and of course I have lived longer.  And then men are much more complex than women, much more difficult, too.  And you, Monsieur George?  Are you complex, with unexpected resistances and difficulties in your etre intime—­your inner self?  I wonder now . . .”