"And you?" she asked. "Were you with Michael?""No, Lady Barbara. I had no pearls."
"And are you naturalised English?" she asked.
"No; I am German."
She slid swiftly off the topic.
"Do you wonder I ask, with your talking English so perfectly?" she said. "You should hear me talking French when we are entertaining Ambassadors and that sort of persons. I talk it so fast that nobody can understand a word I say. That is a defensive measure, you must observe, because even if I talked it quite slowly they would understand just as little. But they think it is the pace that stupefies them, and they leave me in a curious, dazed condition. And now Miss Falbe and I are going to leave you two.
Be rather a long time, dear Michael, so that Mr. Falbe can tell you what he thinks of me, and his sister shall tell me what she thinks of you. Afterwards you and I will tell each other, if it is not too fearful."This did not express quite accurately Lady Barbara's intentions, for she chiefly wanted to find out what she thought of Sylvia.
"And you are great friends, you three?" she said as they settled themselves for the prolonged absence of the two men.
Sylvia smiled; she smiled, Aunt Barbara noticed, almost entirely with her eyes, using her mouth only when it came to laughing; but her eyes smiled quite charmingly.
"That's always rather a rash thing to pronounce on," she said. "Ican tell you for certain that Hermann and I are both very fond of him, but it is presumptuous for us to say that he is equally devoted to us.""My dear, there is no call for modesty about it," said Barbara.
"Between you--for I imagine it is you who have done it--between you you have made a perfectly different creature of the boy. You've made him flower."Sylvia became quite grave.
"Oh, I do hope he likes us," she said. "He is so likable himself."Barbara nodded "And you've had the good sense to find that out," she said. "It's astonishing how few people knew it. But then, as I said, Michael hadn't flowered. No one understood him, or was interested. Then he suddenly made up his mind last summer what he wanted to do and be, and immediately did and was it.""I think he told Hermann," said she. "His father didn't approve, did he?""Approve? My dear, if you knew my brother you would know that the only things he approves of are those which Michael isn't."Sylvia spread her fine hands out to the blaze, warming them and shading her face.
"Michael always seems to us--" she began. "Ah, I called him Michael by mistake.""Then do it on purpose next time," remarked Barbara. "What does Michael seem?""Ah, but don't let him know I called him Michael," said Sylvia in some horror. "There is nothing so awful as to speak of people formally to their faces, and intimately behind their backs. But Hermann is always talking of him as Michael.""And Michael always seems--"
"Oh, yes; he always seems to me to have been part of us, of Hermann and me, for years. He's THERE, if you know what I mean, and so few people are there. They walk about your life, and go in and out, so to speak, but Michael stops. I suppose it's because he is so natural."Aunt Barbara had been a diplomatist long before her husband, and fearful of appearing inquisitive about Sylvia's impression of Michael, which she really wanted to inquire into, instantly changed the subject.
"Ah, everybody who has got definite things to do is natural," she said. "It is only the idle people who have leisure to look at themselves in the glass and pose. And I feel sure that you have definite things to do and plenty of them, my dear. What are they?""Oh, I sing a little," said Sylvia.
"That is the first unnatural thing you have said. I somehow feel that you sing a great deal."Aunt Barbara suddenly got up.
"My dear, you are not THE Miss Falbe, are you, who drove London crazy with delight last summer. Don't tell me you are THE Miss Falbe?"Sylvia laughed.
"Do you know, I'm afraid I must be," she said. "Isn't it dreadful to have to say that after your description?"Aunt Barbara sat down again, in a sort of calm despair.
"If there are any more shocks coming for me to-night," she said, "Ithink I had better go home. I have encountered a perfectly new nephew Michael. I have dressed myself like a suburban housekeeper to meet a Poiret, so don't deny it, and having humourously told Michael I wished to see a prima donna and a pianist, he takes me at my word and produces THE Miss Falbe. I'm glad I knew that in time;I should infallibly have asked you to sing, and if you had done so--you are probably good-natured enough to have done even that--Ishould have given the drawing-room gasp at the end, and told your brother that I thought you sang very prettily."Sylvia laughed.
"But really it wasn't my fault, Lady Barbara," she said. "When we met I couldn't have said, 'Beware! I am THE Miss Falbe.'""No, my dear; but I think you ought, somehow, to have conveyed the impression that you were a tremendous swell. You didn't. I have been thinking of you as a charming girl, and nothing more.""But that's quite good enough for me," said Sylvia.
The two young men joined them after this, and Hermann speedily became engrossed in reading the finished Variations. Some of these pleased him mightily; one he altogether demurred to.
"It's just a crib, Mike," he said. "The critics would say I had forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation out of the Handel theme. That next one's, oh, great fun.
But I wish you would remember that we all haven't got great orang-outang paws like you."
Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael's old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a moment's cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably tactless a thing to him. But the horror was of infinitesimal duration, for she heard Michael's laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano together.
"I wish you had, Hermann," he said. "I know you'll bungle those tenths."Falbe moved to the piano-seat.
