"Immensely," answered Pembroke, with much heartiness, and wishing Madame Koller would sing again. He hardly knew which was the more exasperating, Madame Koller's tone to him in speaking of Olivia, or Olivia's tone in speaking of Madame Koller.
"Olivia is so excessively tame," said she, after a pause. "So cold—so self-contained."
"I don't think she lacks spirit, though," responded Pembroke, with the easy air of a man discussing the most trivial subject, although he swore mentally at Madame Koller for introducing the subject. "Miss Berkeley has the reticence of a gentlewoman. But by heaven! I wouldn't like to arouse that spirit of hers."
Madame Koller sighed. It was a real and genuine sigh. She was thinking how hard and strange it was that she was not permitted by fate to be either a complete gentlewoman or a complete artist. She had learned in her student days, and in that brief and brilliant artistic period, to be reticent about her money matters, but that was all. She saw even in her Aunt Sally Peyton, whom she regarded as an interfering old person, without any style whatever, a certain air of security in what she said and did—a calm indifference to her world—that Madame Koller was keen enough to know marked the gentlewoman—which she, Elise Koller, who had ten times the advantages, and had twenty times the knowledge of the world that old Mrs. Peyton had, was never quite sure—there just was
