Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/47

 'And is it in England you live?' asked the old lady. 'You are recently married? You have children?'

'Married for five years; and no children,' said Jill. Children would not have done at all in her and Dick's life. 'We live in England when we live anywhere. Dick has a studio in London and we have three rooms over it. If you call this a hovel, I don't know what you would call our studio. They put the milk on the stair outside our door in the morning.'

'But you were not born in a studio with three rooms over it,' said the old lady, smiling caressingly upon her.' You were born—shall I tell you?, for I see it plainly—in one of your great, beautiful English countryseats with park and deer and village of retainers such as we read of—not only in Sir Walter'—and Madame de Lamouderie flashed a glance at Graham—'but in later writers, too. You have hunted the fox; you have been presented at Court; you have danced at great balls with the noblesse of your land.'

Jill was again laughing. 'Well, I have danced at a few balls; but the war put an end to most of those for me; and I've been presented at Court; and I certainly have hunted the fox;—that was a clever guess;—there's nothing I love so much. But all the rest is wrong; as wrong as can be,' Jill assured her, her jocund eyes upon her. 'No park; no deer; no retainers at all. Only a very small, very humdrum country-house:—I loved it, of course; because it was my home;—but it was quite ordinary and humdrum all the same.'

'Was? Is it yours no longer?'