Lady Cleff approved of Nature. "That is wise,” she allowed. “What sort of portraits do you do?”

“Oh pretty good ones, I think, if I don’t flatter myself too much. I think Dammler will tell you I paint a pretty good picture.”

“Very good,” Dammler confirmed readily. “In the style of Mona Lisa, Cousin.”

“I like that,” she declared. "There is too much of dressing people in outlandish outfits like Grecians or nymphs and sitting them in strange poses. Phillips and Romney, for instance-always rigging their people out in ridiculous costumes.”

“Ho, Romney, he knew nothing of painting,” Clarence said with enthusiasm. “He is dead, you know. One ought not to speak ill of the dead, but he knew nothing of painting.”

“Romney painted me,” the Countess informed him, her parrot’s nose achieving a sharp point in disapproval.

“You shouldn’t have let him near you. I daresay he gave you a sharp nose and too wide a form.”

Prudence drew in a sharp breath at this telling description of their caller, and looked at the Countess in fear. She found a smile of gratification on that white and orange face. Glancing at Dammler, she thought he was unmoved, till she noticed the laughter lurking in his eyes.

“You should have Mr. Elmtree do a proper likeness of you, Cousin,” he suggested to the Dowager.

“I am past all that,” she demurred, but in no very conclusive manner.

“Nonsense,” Clarence stated firmly. “I could make you look very nice. I know just how to get that bright orange for the cheeks, and the nose would be no problem. I am quite good at a nose.”

These blatant insults were accepted with a smirk, and a preening hand went to the turban on the Countess’ head. “Well, I may have another portrait done. I never thought Romney did me justice.”

“Mr. Elmtree is the very one to do you justice,” Dammler said, flickering a look at Prudence, who shook her head ever so slightly in disapproval.

“I have my paints with me,” Clarence urged on the scheme. “I should be very happy to try my hand at such a challenging model.”

The Countess read even this slur into a compliment, not knowing the challenge lay in her ugliness. “I shall consider it,” she decreed.

She accepted a cup of tea, and when she arose to take her leave she said, “You will call and take Miss Mallow out for a ride one day, Dammler.” She had found the persons satisfactory.

No one present, even including Clarence, saw fit to tell her he had already done so. “She will be happy to go,” was his only comment. “She works too hard.” Prudence had hardly set pen to paper since coming to Bath, and never when he was present to see it.

Dammler made no protest whatsoever, and the Countess said when leaving, “It is settled then,” very well pleased with this highhanded manner of arranging young peoples’ lives.

As the two drove home, the Countess said to Dammler, “I am happy to see you have some worthwhile friends in London. Mrs. Mallow has nothing to say, but Mr. Elmtree is quite unexceptionable, and the girl is well enough. She does just as she is bid by her uncle, and it is reassuring to see that in a young lady nowadays. No doubt she will settle down now that her uncle is here. She was racketing about not chaperoned as she should be, but that will come to an end.”

“Yes, she has a great respect for her uncle,” the deceitful creature corroborated, without a blush.

The Countess had bid him drive out with Miss Mallow, and he intended doing so the next day, but alas his cousin had other plans for him. She was ordering new draperies for her Purple Saloon, and required his escort to the drapery shop. There was only one bolt of purple in the shop, but this by no means meant she only looked at it. She also had to consider red and blue and a dozen patterned ells before agreeing to the purple, while Dammler walked back and forth, drawing out his watch and calculating how quickly he could get her home if they left immediately. He knew he had missed his chance when they had been there an hour and a quarter. It was graphically illustrated when they at last went out into the street in time to see Prudence atop Ronald Springer’s curricle. She waved to them in a friendly manner.

“My, it is Springer, with that Mallow girl,” the Countess said. “Perhaps you shouldn’t take her out after all. Springer might take it amiss.”

This was the very phrase to ensure that Dammler would be at her door early the next morning and so he was, only to hear that she had gone off for the day to see Blaize Castle with Springer and a group of young people.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. To pay homage to her caller, and to show off her new purple drapes, the Countess would throw a party. Dammler was permitted to ask a few people under seventy, and he was not tardy in sending a note to the Mallows and Clarence. Unfortunately, the Dowager had the inspiration of including Springer, as well, but it could not be helped. The party was scheduled for three days hence, and the only sight Dammler had of Miss Mallow in the interim was to bow to her twice across the Pump Room in the mornings; the rest of the time he was kept busy.

The party, which the Dowager called a drum, was a major event in her life, and much discussed. “It is what the rackety crew nowadays call a rout,” she explained to Dammler. “Cards and conversation for the civilized members of the party, with a small parlour given over to dancing for the savages. I shall hire a fiddle.”

“And perhaps someone to play the pianoforte,” he suggested.

“No, no, Allan. It will be only a few country dances. A fiddle is what Papa always had.”

“Yes, but nowadays, Cousin…"

“Fiddle!” she said with a hard stare, and a fiddle it was.

The refreshments were to be equally antiquated and austere. Orgeat, lemonade and punch were to be the beverages. Not a mention of champagne, and the food was to be a frugal luncheon with no lobster or oysters or even roasted fowl. Dammler began to perceive the drum was an appalling idea, but the invitations were out and accepted before the full meagerness of the evening’s entertainment dawned on him. Decorations consisted of one palm tree rented from the floral shop, and an extra brace of candles lit in the main saloon, to show off the purple drapes.

The austerity of the whole was made more ludicrous by the degree of formality to be observed. Formal dress was called for, and she spoke of “a reception line,” to consist of the pair of them, to greet the guests as they arrived, thence to be handed over to the butler for announcing. She kept notes to help the Bath Journal write it up for the social column, and sent her distracted cousin on a dozen useless errands to arrange various details of the “orgy.” The only consolation Dammler could see in the scheme was that Prudence would see him in a new light-respectable, above reproach. She would see there was a serious, worthwhile side to his nature.

The great evening of the drum finally arrived. Lady Cleff decked herself out in a severe black gown, enlivened with a gray fall of Mechlin lace and a cameo for the night’s frolic. Dammler took up his post beside her in the doorway of the main saloon, wearing satin breeches, a black coat, and his most dazed expression. The majority of the guests, relicts like the Dowager herself, saw nothing absurd in the proceedings, but both Springer and later Miss Mallow were stunned. Prudence gazed in wonder to see Dammler playing his part in this charade, standing at attention with his aged relative, shaking hands with doddering old crones. She remembered him smiling and debonair at the opera, at Hettie’s ball, and at a hundred other gay places which existed for her only in imagination from his having mentioned them. She could hardly credit he was the same person. Formal wear being called for, she had worn a new gown of pale lilac, cut low in front, with lilacs at the bodice. Lady Cleff glared at her shoulders and lifted her lorgnette to Dammler as though to say, “What have we here?”

Prudence observed, and she too looked at Dammler with a question in her eyes. The first opportunity she had after the reception line broke up she said to him, “You should have warned me it was to be a mourning party and I would have worn black like everyone else. I feel a very peacock among the crows.”

“My cousin is old-fashioned, but even she, I am sure, does not expect a young lady to wear black to a drum.”

“Except perhaps to a “hum drum,” she replied, looking about the room, where everyone sat in silence. No one had yet gone to dance or play cards.

“You look lovely, Prudence,” he said, taking in every detail of her toilette.

“Oh thank you. My shoulders are much admired here in Bath, but I do wish I had brought a shawl, preferably black.”

Dammler felt a pulse of anger at this remark. “Who in Bath particularly admires them?”

“The gentlemen,” she answered pertly. “I can’t recall that I ever received a compliment on my shoulders from a lady.”

“I suppose ladies who wear immodest gowns lay themselves open to that sort of impertinence,” he said angrily.

She was too shocked to answer. Her gown she knew was beautiful and not immodest-certainly not to a person accustomed to London styles, as Dammler was. “You are hard to please, milord,” she said when she had her speech back. “You have upbraided me before for wearing grandmother’s gowns, but I hadn’t thought you would object to this.”

“I object to gentlemen making impertinent speeches to you, and I object to your inviting them.”

“I cannot think I invited this particular impertinence,” she said, and turned angrily away.

Luck was not with Dammler that evening. The first person to come up to Prudence was Springer, and the first words to leave his mouth were, “How stunning you look this evening, Miss Mallow. What a marvelous gown.”