Page 82 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

as the phrase is, to chaff her; he very soon established with
her a reputation for treating everything as a joke, and he
was not a man to neglect the privileges such a reputation
conferred. She accused him of an odious want of serious-
ness, of laughing at all things, beginning with himself. Such
slender faculty of reverence as he possessed centred wholly
upon his father; for the rest, he exercised his wit indiffer-
ently upon his father’s son, this gentleman’s weak lungs,
his useless life, his fantastic mother, his friends (Lord War-
burton in especial), his adopted, and his native country, his
charming new-found cousin. ‘I keep a band of music in my
ante-room,’ he said once to her. ‘It has orders to play with-
out stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps
the sounds of the world from reaching the private apart-
ments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on
within.’ It was dance-music indeed that you usually heard
when you came within ear-shot of Ralph’s band; the liveli-
est waltzes seemed to float upon the air. Isabel often found
herself irritated by this perpetual fiddling; she would have
liked to pass through the ante-room, as her cousin called it,
and enter the private apartments. It mattered little that he
had assured her they were a very dismal place; she would
have been glad to undertake to sweep them and set them in
order. It was but half-hospitality to let her remain outside;
to punish him for which Isabel administered innumerable
taps with the ferule of her straight young wit. It must be said
that her wit was exercised to a large extent in self-defence,
for her cousin amused himself with calling her ‘Columbia’
and accusing her of a patriotism so heated that it scorched.

82 The Portrait of a Lady