Jill [antikvár]

JILL I The Oliver Galbraiths had to pay super-tax. They were, like all those who are subject to this outrage, badly off. Cathie Galbraith could have either a car, or a maid of her own, but not both. She chose the car, and did her own hair, and the housemaid did her mending. Galbraith was a stockbroker. They lived in Chelsea Park Gardens. Cathie Galbraith, at thirty, lived life very consciously. She knew the value of her own appreciations, and she enjoyed—not at all arrogantly, but rather with a faint tang of pleasant amusement—her own powers of enjoyment. It was agreeable, she felt, to be endowed with artistic perception, but she perfectly realised that the artistic perception, without the assistance of a careful education, might have merely landed its possessor in a morass of likes and dislikes, of clumsy fumblings after sound, and shape, and colour, that should conform to a standard itself rather blurred and unstable. Cathie's standards were quite definite. How should they not be, when she had all her life not only been shown, but—subtle and all-embracing distinction—taught to see, the true and the beautiful.