Isn't he your nephew? How on earth
could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so charming to me," she went on,
modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what must actually
have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been so charming),
I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked, as though at
some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the excessive
recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality. It has since
struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life
by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity,
all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for,
like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or
to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their
gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious
setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men. And
just as this one filled the smoking-room, where my uncle was entertaining
her in his alpaca coat, with her charming person, her dress of pink silk,
her pearls, and the refinement suggested by intimacy with a Grand Duke,
so, in the same way, she had taken some casual remark by my father, had
worked it up delicately, given it a 'turn,' a precious title, set in it
the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended
of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a
jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.
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