Joyselle as he played recalled another little boy who, years before, had
listened in much the same way to another man playing the violin, and the
comparison is not so far-fetched as it seems, for although the blind
fiddler of the sunny day in Normandy had been only a third-rate scraper
of the bow, and Joyselle one of the world's very greatest artists, yet
in one thing they joined issue. Each of them gave to the listening child
before him his very best.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dinner that night was a very grand affair. Fledge inspired awe by his
majestic mien--Fledge liked duchesses--and Burton and William, the
recently promoted, with their heads striped with grease and powder,
looked to the enraptured eyes of the female servants their very best.
There were crimson roses in beautiful silver vases on the table, and in
the centre stood a particularly hideous but very valuable silver
ship--"given," as Tommy once gravely explained to a guest, "by somebody
or other--a king, or an admiral, I think--to one of my ancestors, in the
seventeenth century, who did something or other rather well."
Lady Kingsmead, under the Duchess' influence, was suffering from one of
her attacks of thinking Tommy "quaint," so, by the old lady's
suggestion, the boy was allowed to sit at the foot of his own table,
pretending, as he had told his sister he should find it necessary to do,
to be as young as his mother's guests.
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