Emily took up the hair-brushes.
"There'll be just time to brush your head," she said, "before they come.
You must look your best, James."
"Ah!" muttered James; "they say she's pretty."
The meeting with his new daughter-in-law took place in the dining-room.
James was seated by the fire when she was brought in. He placed, his
hands on the arms of the chair and slowly raised himself. Stooping and
immaculate in his frock-coat, thin as a line in Euclid, he received
Annette's hand in his; and the anxious eyes of his furrowed face, which
had lost its colour now, doubted above her. A little warmth came into
them and into his cheeks, refracted from her bloom.
"How are you?" he said. "You've been to see the Queen, I suppose? Did
you have a good crossing?"
In this way he greeted her from whom he hoped for a grandson of his
name.
Gazing at him, so old, thin, white, and spotless, Annette murmured
something in French which James did not understand.
"Yes, yes," he said, "you want your lunch, I expect. Soames, ring the
bell; we won't wait for that chap Dartie." But just then they arrived.
Dartie had refused to go out of his way to see 'the old girl.' With an
early cocktail beside him, he had taken a 'squint' from the smoking-room
of the Iseeum, so that Winifred and Imogen had been obliged to come back
from the Park to fetch him thence. His brown eyes rested on Annette with
a stare of almost startled satisfaction. The second beauty that fellow
Soames had picked up! What women could see in him! Well, she would play
him the same trick as the other, no doubt; but in the meantime he was a
lucky devil! And he brushed up his moustache, having in nine months
of Green Street domesticity regained almost all his flesh and his
assurance. Despite the comfortable efforts of Emily, Winifred's
composure, Imogen's enquiring friendliness, Dartie's showing-off, and
James' solicitude about her food, it was not, Soames felt, a successful
lunch for his bride. He took her away very soon.
"That Monsieur Dartie," said Annette in the cab, "je n'aime pas ce
type-la!"
"No, by George!" said Soames.
"Your sister is veree amiable, and the girl is pretty. Your father is
veree old. I think your mother has trouble with him; I should not like
to be her."
Soames nodded at the shrewdness, the clear hard judgment in his young
wife; but it disquieted him a little. The thought may have just flashed
through him, too: 'When I'm eighty she'll be fifty-five, having trouble
with me!'