"Hark!" said Jessie; "there's a knock at the door."
Christabel's heart began to beat violently. Could it be Angus? No, it was more likely to be some officious person, offering ices.
It was neither; but a young man of the languid-elegant type--one of Christabel's devoted admirers, the very youth who had told her of his having seen "Cupid and Psyche," fifteen times.
"Why this makes the sixteenth time," she said, smiling at him as they shook hands.
"I think it is nearer the twentieth," he replied; "it is quite the jolliest piece in London! Don't you agree with me?"
"I think it is--remarkably--jolly!" answered Christabel, laughing. "What odd words you have in London for the expression of your ideas--and so few of them!"
"A kind of short-hand," said the Major, "arbitrary characters. Jolly means anything you like--awful means anything you like. That kind of language gives the widest scope for the exercise of the imagination."
"How is Mrs. Tregonell?" asked the youth, not being given to the discussion of abstract questions, frivolous or solemn. He had a mind which could only grasp life in the concrete--an intellect that required to deal with actualities--people, coats, hats, boots, dinner, park-hack--just as little children require actual counters to calculate with.
He subsided into a chair behind Miss Courtenay, and, the box being a large one, remained there for the rest of the play--to the despair of a companion youth in the stalls, who looked up ever and anon, vacuous and wondering, and who resembled his friend as closely as a well-matched carriage-horse resembles his fellow--grooming and action precisely similar.
"What brilliant diamonds!" said Christabel, noticing a collet necklace which Psyche wore in the second act, and which was a good deal out of harmony with her Greek drapery--not by any means resembling those simple golden ornaments which patient Dr. Schliemann and his wife dug out of the hill at Hissarlik. "But, of course, they are only stage jewels," continued Christabel; "yet they sparkle as brilliantly as diamonds of the first water."
"Very odd, but so they do," muttered young FitzPelham, behind her shoulder; and then, _sotto voce_ to the Major, he said--"that's the worst of giving these women jewels, they _will_ wear them."