'Oh yes, papa. Don't you remember? That delightful Mr. Audouin is coming
to take us round to some of the studios.'
The colonel pushed his chair away from the table somewhat testily. 'The
Yankee man, you mean, I suppose?' he said, with a considerable trace of
acerbity in his manner. 'That fellow who kept talking so much the other
day about some German of the name of Heine (I find out from Mrs.
Wilmer, by the way, that this man Heine was far from being a respectable
person). So you've promised to go mooning about the studios with him,
have you?'
'Yes, papa, and he'll be here at ten; so please now go at once and get
ready.'
The colonel grumbled a little--it was his double privilege, as a Briton
and a military man, to grumble as much as he thought necessary, on all
possible occasions; but by the time Audouin arrived, he was quite
ready, with his silk hat brushed up to the Bond Street pattern, and his
eminently respectable kid gloves shaming Audouin's bare hands with their
exquisite newness.
'How kind of you to take us, Mr. Audouin,' Gwen said, with one of her
artless smiles: 'I'm really so delighted to get a chance of seeing
something of the inner life of artists. And you're going to introduce us
to Maragliano, too! What an honour!'
'Oh, quite so,' the colonel assented readily; 'most gratifying,
certainly. A very remarkable painter, Signor Maragliano!'
'But most remarkable of all as a sculptor,' Audouin put in quickly,
before Gwen had time to correct her father's well-meant blunder. 'A
magnificent figure, his Psyche. This way, Miss Russell, down the Corso.'
'Our name is Howard-Russell, Mr. Audouin, if you please--two surnames,
with a dash between them,' the colonel interrupted (one can hardly
expect the military mind to discriminate accurately between a dash and
a hyphen). 'My ancestor, the fourth earl, who was a Howard, you know,
married a Lady Mary Russell, daughter of the fifth Marquis of Marsh
wood--a great heiress--and took her name. That was how the Russell
connection first got into the Howard family.'
'Indeed!' Audouin answered, with forced politeness. (The best bred
Americans find it hard to understand our genealogical interest.) 'But
the double name's a little long, isn't it, for practical purposes? In
an easy-going old-world country like Europe, people can find time for so
many syllables, I dare say; but I'm afraid we hurry-scurrying Americans
would kick against having to give one person two surnames every time we
spoke to him, colonel.'
The colonel drew himself up rather stiffly. That any man could make
light of so serious a subject as the Howard-Russell name and pedigree
was an idea that had hardly before even occurred to his exalted
consideration.
They walked along the Corso, and through the narrow street till they
arrived at the Via Colonna. Then Audouin dived down that abode of
artists, with Gwen chatting away to him gaily, and the colonel stalking
beside them in solemn silence, till they reached Maragliano's studio.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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