The Marriage of William Ashe
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
THREE YEARS AFTER
CHAPTER VII
"HER ladyship will be in before six, my lady—I was to be sure and ask you to wait, if you came before, and to tell you that her ladyship had gone to Madame Fanchette about her dress for the ball."
So said Lady Kitty's maid. Lady Tranmore hesitated, then said she would wait, and asked that Master Henry might be brought down.
The maid went for the child, and Lady Tranmore entered the drawing-room. The Ashes had been settled since their marriage in a house in Bruton Street,—a house to which Kitty had lost her heart at first sight. It was old and distinguished, covered here and there with eighteenth-century decoration, once no doubt a little florid and coarse beside the finer work of the period, but now agreeably blunted and mellowed by time. Kitty had had her impetuous and decided way with the furnishing of it; and though Lady Tranmore professed to admire it, the result was in truth too French and too pagan for her taste. Her own room reflected the rising worship of Morris and Burne-Jones, of which indeed she had been an adept from the beginning. Her walls were covered by the well-known pomegranate, or jessamine, or sunflower patterns; her hangings were of a mystic greenish-blue; her pictures were drawn either from the Italian primitives or their modern followers. Celtic romance, Christian symbolism, all that was touching, other-worldly, and obscure,—our late English form, in fact, of the great Romantic reaction,—it was amid influences of this kind that Lady Tranmore lived and fed her own imagination. The dim, suggestive, and pathetic; twilight rather than dawn; autumn rather than spring; yearning rather than fulfilment; "the gleam" rather, than noon-day:—it was in this half-lit, richly colored sphere that she and most of her friends saw the tent of Beauty pitched.
But Kitty would have none of it. She quoted French sceptical remarks about the legs and joints of the Burne-Jones knights; she declared that so much pattern made her dizzy; and that the French were the only nation in the world who understood a salon, whether as upholstery or conversation. Accordingly, in days when these things were rare, the girl of eighteen made her new husband provide her with white-panelled walls, lightly gilt, and with a Persian carpet of which the mass was of a plain blackish-gray, and only the border was allowed to flower. A few Louis Quinze girandoles on the walls, a Vernis-Martin screen, an old French clock, two or three inlaid cabinets, and a collection of lightly built chairs and settees in the French mode,—this was all she would allow; and while Lady Tranmore's room was always crowded, Kitty's, which was much smaller, had always an air of space. French books were scattered here and there; and only one picture was admitted. That was a Watteau sketch of a group from "L'Embarquement pour Cythère." Kitty adored it; Lady Tranmore thought it absurd and disagreeable.
As she entered the room now, on this May afternoon, she looked round it with her usual distaste. On several of the chairs large illustrated books were lying. They contained pictures of seventeenth and eighteenth century costume,—one of them displayed a colored engraving of a brilliant Madame de Pompadour, by Nattier.
The maid who followed her into the room began to remove the books.
"Her ladyship has been choosing her
