Fewer girls create a sensation, when they make their presentation
curtsey at Buckingham Palace, than are said to have done so. Too many
pretty débutantes follow each other to the Royal footstool for any one
of them to be singled out very especially by those who stand watching
them.
Miss Sên did not create a sensation at the court of St. James that
night, but she was noticed and she thoroughly enjoyed herself through
all of the function that so many girls find an ordeal. “I wasn’t
frightened one single bit--not once,” she said gleefully as she drove
home with her mother and Ruben, who had joined them as they left the
Palace.
Why should she have been--the girl who came of a clan whose women had
been court ladies when Britain was a wilderness, whose women had been
of rank for thousands of years, and one of whom had been an Empress
when Chinese ruled in China, before the Manchu came to its throne!
She carried her birth with her--its composure and sunny ease, its
dignity and suavity. Sir Charles, watching her as the girlish figure in
girlish gown swept softly across the palace floor and bent before the
throne, said to himself as he had a thousand times before, “How birth
tells!”--a very trite saying that is the truest of them all.
Ivy Sên did not create a sensation at the Drawing-Room, but she did in
the season it opened for her. Society made much of her, perhaps largely
for the reason she had given bitterly to Lady Snow. But what the girl
had anticipated sorely as a very “bitter pill” she found an exceedingly
sweet morsel. Society liked her; she loved it. Ivy scarcely would have
exchanged places now with her mother’s pathetically plain kitchen maid.
Ivy forgot her grievance, forgot to be unhappy--for a time.
No one slighted her. Men told her that she was lovely, and told her
that they found her charming; said it with their eyes, told it because
they sought her.
The girl was girlishly happy; and because she was happy, suddenly
docile and sweet.
Mrs. Sên was radiant and grateful; her one trouble had passed. Ruben
went back greatly relieved to keep his last term at Cambridge.
“Mother,” Ivy suggested at breakfast, “let’s cut everything out this
morning and go off to the Academy early while the rooms are comfortably
empty. I’d like to _see_ a few of the pictures, wouldn’t you? We’ve
been twice, and I haven’t seen a thing but other women’s hats.”
“I have a fitting at eleven, dear; and you know the Bessingtons are
lunching here--and Caverley.”
“Chuck the fitting; it will keep. We’ll be back for lunch if we go now.
You must come with me; we never have five minutes together now. You
can’t want any more breakfast, you’ve had lots. Come along! I’ll race
you to see who can change quickest and we’ll be off before the bores
begin to gather.”
Mrs. Sên laughed and pushed back her chair obediently. It was nice to
go off alone with Ivy for the morning--nicer that Ivy wished it.
“I’ll race you up the stairs,” the girl offered as they went through
the hall. Ivy’s arm about her mother’s waist.
“Race yourself--if you feel like it in a habit after an hour’s ride. I
decline to run up two flights of stairs. How did Polyanne behave?”
“Like a vixen, but I took it out of her--had a scrumptious ride.”
Ivy scurried up the stairs to change her habit. Mrs. Sên followed her
happily, a little more slowly.
They had breakfasted really early--as they often did even in the whirl
of Ivy’s first season, Ivy daintily ravenous after her earlier ride.
Burlington House was comfortably uncrowded when they wormed their way
through the turnstile.
They both liked pictures, of course. Who doesn’t? But neither mother
nor daughter knew much about them. But one must have a look at the
Academy, at least the Picture of the Year and the portraits. Mrs. Sên
made it a rule to read up the Academy of the year in the _Morning
Post_, and to know what to look at, and what to think of them when
she did, before she went. But she really hadn’t had time to do it this
year--what with her clothes and Ivy’s, choosing and fittings, a perfect
jungle of engagements to keep, invitations to answer and send, and all
the rest of the fashionable technique of Ivy’s first season. She did
not even know which was _the_ picture this year or who had painted it.
But here they were, Ivy glad to have had her way about coming, Mrs. Sên
glad because they were together, and they did their duty, slowly and
cheerfully and carefully, giving at least a glance to every picture,
even marking their catalogues now and then, a good, useful precaution
for future table talk. They did their duty by Rooms I, II, and III.
“Most enough for one day?” the girl suggested.
“Darling, we must see Maud Towner’s miniature! She’ll never forgive us
if we don’t.”
“Run along and look at it then, you poor dear conscientious mother.
I’ll wait here nice and comfy on this torture of a red bench until you
come back, and then we’ll go home, don’t you think? You can tell me
what Lady Towner’s miniature has on, if it has anything, and how its
hair is done, and I’ll be able to rave about it to her every bit as
well as you.”
Mrs. Sên nodded indulgently and plodded off to the Miniature Room.
There were not many here yet though it was nearly noon. It was August;
the Academy had run its course. A sprinkling of artists, a few country
late-comers were about all here to-day--no one Miss Sên had ever seen
before, no one that interested her now.
But she noticed a thin crowd gather once or twice at a canvas across
the room and linger there a little.
“Think of painting _her_!” she heard a girl say indignantly to another
as they turned out of the small group about the picture.
“No accounting for tastes!” the other stranger replied with a shrug.
So it was some woman’s portrait. Was she notoriously déclassée, or only
plain, Ivy wondered idly.
She got up and went to have a look for herself, less because she was
curious than because she was far from “comfy” on the settee which she
herself had called not too unkindly a “torture.”
Two men--more of her own class than any one she had noticed here this
morning before--turned away from the canvas as she reached it. They
both were grinning.
“Devilish pretty Chink, I call her,” the younger man said, and they
both laughed.
Ivy stiffened, gave them a cold little haughty stare, and passed them
to the picture.
Ivy Sên flushed an angry crimson as she saw a very beautiful picture--a
full-length figure of a gorgeously robed, richly jeweled Chinese
woman; a woman with tiny deformed feet and embroidered trousers. She
was wearing elaborate nail protectors, but one long-nailed finger
was uncovered, a jeweled protector lying beside a long silver-pipe,
a queer little musical instrument of some sort, and a squat little
earthenware god on a table of shiny black wood. The sumptuous figure
was not belittled by an overemphasized background, but the pictorial
temptation of still-life accessories had been beyond the painter’s full
resistance. A great embroidered curtain swept behind the girl--a great
sprawling dragon of green and bronze on the sunflower yellow folds,
and through an open window at the canvas’ edge a distant pagoda was
glimpsed.
Did she look as heathen-Chinee as that, in spite of the soft gray Paris
frock and the girlish Bond Street hat? More Chinese perhaps because of
the attempted disguise of her English clothes?
Had that man with the ruddy hair meant the girl in the picture was a
pretty Chink, or that _she_ was? They had been coming towards her as
he spoke, and not three feet away. If he had meant her, he had not
had even the courage of his insufferable impudence; for the puppy had
flushed a sheepish pink when he met her eyes and saw that she had
overheard. She had not noticed the other man, but they both had laughed.
Mrs. Sên coming back was startled at Ivy’s stiffened pose and the
chill angry misery on the girl’s face. Ivy stood with her back to the
picture, but near it, as if defying any one to overlook her who looked
at it. She stood very still--with a small bitter sneer on her small red
mouth.
The winter of Ivy Sên’s discontent had come again.
The mother saw that it had, and saw why.
They appeared--the girl on the canvas and the girl in the flesh--as
China Smiling in Sunshine and China Frozen in Shadow.
Ruby Sên’s mother-heart stood still for a moment. Then she smiled and
said gaily, “Here I am, dear.”
“I think that we are the picture of the year,” Ivy said clearly--others
beside Mrs. Sên must have heard her--with a queer little gesture
towards the “A Chinese Lady.”
Then without another word Ivy led their way out of the rooms, down
the stairs, across the entrance hall out on to the porch, down again
and across the quadrangle. The girl walked proudly, and her narrow
slant-set black eyes were sultry and bitter, hard with pain and
defiance: China in Storm.
Under the Piccadilly Archway Mrs. Sên stopped abruptly and held out her
hand to one of two men who were lighting their cigarettes there.
“Why, Roland! It is you, isn’t it?”
The ruddy-haired man of Ivy Sên’s discomfiture said, with his foot
on the cigarette he had flung down, hat, gloves and stick dexterously
clutched in his left hand, that it certainly was.
“It’s Roland Curtis, Ivy; Cousin Lillian’s youngest boy,” Mrs. Sên
explained.
Curtis went red, and dropped his gloves. But Ivy Sên smiled sweetly and
held out a cousinly hand.
“I saw you admiring my portrait in there just now, Cousin Roland,” Ivy
said, innocently.
Roland Curtis mumbled something--no one understood what; he least of
all.
Ivy laughed--a pretty, friendly laugh of sheer amusement And Mrs. Sên
and the man who had picked up the glove Curtis had dropped both saw
that the girl gave Roland’s hand a tiny friendly squeeze before she
dropped it.
Mrs. Sên smothered a sigh. Ivy was up to mischief! She knew Ivy so
well, and the quick-witted woman instantly had reconstructed the small
incident that she had not seen in Room IV.
“Your friend?” the woman said with a glance that said, “You may
introduce him, Roland,” and, of course, had to be obeyed.
Roland Curtis’s only wish was to disappear quickly and permanently; he
gave the introduction reluctantly and awkwardly.
“Oh--don’t you know Tommy Gaylor?”
“No, we never have met but I knew his father and mother very well
indeed when I was in Madrid years ago. You must be Sir William’s son,
Mr. Gaylor, for you might be he. Won’t you come with Roland to see me
and tell me all about your people? In Delhi now, aren’t they?”
Gaylor said that they were, and said how glad he’d be to call if he
might--and meant it.
“You’ll come soon, won’t you, Roland?”
Roland promised that he would, and vowed to himself that he would
not--soon or ever.
“Why don’t you bring them home to lunch with us now?” Miss Sên
suggested.
Yes; Ivy was going to make trouble! Mrs. Sên knew it, and Tom Gaylor
suspected it.
“Sorry--awfully sorry,” Curtis hastily refused the invitation that
Mrs. Sên had not given, and intended not to give, if she could avoid
it gracefully. “Got to catch the one-fifteen at Victoria; Tommy and
I are going to--to Frimley to cousins of his for the week-end--the
Burton-Hamiltons. I’ll bring him to see you next week though. So jolly
glad we ran into us--you, I mean. Can I get you a taxi, or have you got
a car waiting? I say, Tom--we’ve cut it rather fine, haven’t we!”
“We are going to walk,” Ivy said before her mother could speak. Mrs.
Sên was half afraid Ivy was going to suggest walking toward Victoria.
“Can I call you a taxi, Cousin Roland?” the girl ended concernedly.
Curtis was speechless.
Gaylor came to the rescue. “No--thanks awfully, Miss Sên. Can’t afford
half a taxi between us to-day. We’ve got to penny bus it.”
She let her new-found cousin escape then--but she made him shake hands
with her again.
Mrs. Sên made no comment as she and Ivy went leisurely homeward. She
would choose a wiser time.
She wished they had not come to the Academy. She wished she had slipped
past Roland Curtis without “seeing” him. That would have been easy and
plausible enough; for she had not seen him for years, and had no idea
that he was in England.
She hoped that Ivy would be nice to the Bessingtons at lunch.
Ivy did not come down to lunch. Her head was bursting; she’d have to
lie down in the dark, she said as they turned in at their gate.
It was true.