that to a gentleman, and a stranger. . .I can’t imagine what your father can mean, letting you grow up like this. He certainly knows better than this—”
“I’m not to blame for the way he acted. You are the one, yourself. Suppose you’d been sitting in your room in your shimmy, and a couple of men you hardly knew had walked in on you and tried to persuade you to go somewhere you didn’t want to go, what would you have done?”
“These people are different,” her aunt told her coldly. “You don’t understand them. Artists don’t require privacy as we do: it means nothing whatever to them. But any one, artist or no, would object—”
“Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted coarsely. “You’re jibbing.”
Mr. Talliaferro reappeared panting with delicate repression. “Gordon was called hurriedly away. He asked me to make his excuses and to express his disappointment over having to leave so unceremoniously.”
“Then he’s not coming to dinner.” Mrs. Maurier sighed, feeling her age, the imminence of dark and death. She seemed not only unable to get new men any more, but to hold to the old ones, even. . . Mr. Talliaferro, too. . . age, age. . . . She sighed again. “Come, darling,” she said in a strangely chastened tone, quieter, pitiable in a way. The niece put both her firm tanned hands on the marble, hard, hard. O beautiful, she whispered in salutation and farewell, turning quickly away.
“Let’s go,” she said, “I’m starving.”
Mr. Talliaferro had lost his box of matches: he was desolated. So they were forced to feel their way down the stairs, disturbing years and years of dust upon the rail. The stone corridor was cool and dank and filled with a suppressed minor humming. They hurried on.
