Since the process
which had produced them was so costly, how could they help being costly
themselves? Woburn was too logical to expect to give no more for a piece
of old Sevres than for a bit of kitchen crockery; he had no faith in
wonderful bargains, and believed that one got in life just what one was
willing to pay for. He had no mind to dispute the taste of those who
preferred the rustic simplicity of the earthen crock; but his own fancy
inclined to the piece of _pate tendre_ which must be kept in a glass case
and handled as delicately as a flower.
It was not merely by the external grace of these drawing-room ornaments
that Woburn's sensibilities were charmed. His imagination was touched by
the curious exoticism of view resulting from such conditions; He had
always enjoyed listening to Miss Talcott even more than looking at her.
Her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those
tropical orchids which strike root in air. Miss Talcott's opinions had no
connection with the actual; her very materialism had the grace of
artificiality. Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless
before a smoking lamp: she had been obliged to ring for a servant because
she did not know how to put it out.
Her supreme charm was the simplicity that comes of taking it for granted
that people are born with carriages and country-places: it never occurred
to her that such congenital attributes could be matter for self-
consciousness, and she had none of the _nouveau riche_ prudery which
classes poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave in the
presence of either.
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