"But you _are_ one, Nick--you are!" the girl cried.
Lady Agnes looked for an instant as if she were going to say once more
"Don't be vulgar!" But she suppressed these words, had she intended
them, and uttered sounds, few in number and not completely articulate,
to the effect that she hated talking about art. While her son spoke she
had watched him as if failing to follow; yet something in the tone of
her exclamation hinted that she had understood him but too well.
"We're all in the same boat," Biddy repeated with cheerful zeal.
"Not me, if you please!" Lady Agnes replied. "It's horrid messy work,
your modelling."
"Ah but look at the results!" said the girl eagerly--glancing about at
the monuments in the garden as if in regard even to them she were,
through that unity of art her brother had just proclaimed, in some
degree an effective cause.
"There's a great deal being done here--a real vitality," Nicholas Dormer
went on to his mother in the same reasonable informing way. "Some of
these fellows go very far."
"They do indeed!" said Lady Agnes.
"I'm fond of young schools--like this movement in sculpture," Nick
insisted with his slightly provoking serenity.
"They're old enough to know better!"
"Mayn't I look, mamma? It _is_ necessary to my development," Biddy
declared.
"You may do as you like," said Lady Agnes with dignity.
"She ought to see good work, you know," the young man went on.
"I leave it to your sense of responsibility." This statement was
somewhat majestic, and for a moment evidently it tempted Nick, almost
provoked him, or at any rate suggested to him an occasion for some
pronouncement he had had on his mind. Apparently, however, he judged the
time on the whole not quite right, and his sister Grace interposed with
the inquiry--
"Please, mamma, are we never going to lunch?"
"Ah mother, mother!" the young man murmured in a troubled way, looking
down at her with a deep fold in his forehead.
For Lady Agnes also, as she returned his look, it seemed an occasion;
but with this difference that she had no hesitation in taking advantage
of it. She was encouraged by his slight embarrassment, for ordinarily
Nick was not embarrassed. "You used to have so _much_ sense of
responsibility," she pursued; "but sometimes I don't know what has
become of it--it seems all, _all_ gone!"
"Ah mother, mother!" he exclaimed again--as if there were so many things
to say that it was impossible to choose. But now he stepped closer, bent
over her and in spite of the publicity of their situation gave her a
quick expressive kiss. The foreign observer whom I took for granted in
beginning to sketch this scene would have had to admit that the rigid
English family had after all a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed
looked round her to see if at this moment they were noticed. She judged
with satisfaction that they had escaped.