“Tell me, does Mark Wirth really love her?” Thurley insisted. She had grown to feel more at home with Hobart than she had fancied could occur; even during his abrupt, aloof moments she sensed the gentler part of him as being merely sidetracked for the time being.
“Mark,” said Hobart as he sat at the piano, “is a case of the old warning, ‘Vices first abhorred, next endured, last embraced.’ That is why I beg you to make your visits to the Hotel Particular far between and few.”
“But sometime he will love some one and then he’ll find himself,” Thurley concluded. “Can he go on dancing attendance on a silly old woman who wants him to sacrifice his art to be a professional ballroom dancer?”
“You are here for a singing lesson,” Hobart tried to argue, “but, as you are on the subject, suppose you suggest that thought to Mark, if you ever have a moment alone with him. Don’t tell him if there is a door ajar—unless you look into the next room first. Lissa is the eternal vigilante when it comes to Mark. Bah, it is all bad tasting, let’s sing some ballads to get the very idea out of our heads.” He began, “Hark, hark, the lark” which Thurley sang—and as she sang it to him, she did it exquisitely.
As she finished, he asked, “You and Lady Sensible are good pals, are you not?”
“You mean Ernestine? Oh, yes, I love her,” Thurley began rapturously, “even when she is at her meanest.”
“Bravo! I will tell you something. Lady Sensible is a great artist, none greater in her way, but if she would buy Christmas presents for cross singing teachers and halfway cry when she thought cross teachers had bought nothing for her, if she would be unbecomingly rosy when she took tea with a certain old actor and jump right up and down and say, ‘Oh—Oh!’ when she saw Collin’s latest portrait, also sitting up half the night to read that rascal Caleb’s latest novel, although she knows it to be worthless—I think Lady Sensible could play lullabies that would give women the patience of eternity and girls the thrill of expectant motherhood and inspire men on to the heights. Don’t tell her I say this for I have already tried to argue it out with her, but she fights me back with her desiccated logic! But, Thurley, do you keep your childish appreciation of things and that adorable intuition—then all the world will go a-hunting laurel wreaths for you!”