They found the first basis of their intimacy in a common wish for the union of their offsprings.  This subject had never been mentioned between them.  Mrs. Conyers would have discussed it had she dared; but she knew at least the attitude of the other.  Furthermore, Mrs. Meredith brought to this association a beautiful weakness:  she was endowed with all but preternatural insight into what is fine in human nature, but had slight power of discovering what is base; she seemed endowed with far-sightedness in high, clear, luminous atmospheres, but was short-sighted in moral twilights.  She was, therefore, no judge of the character of her intimate.  As for that lady’s reputation, this was well known to her; but she screened herself against this reputation behind what she believed to be her own personal discovery of unsuspected virtues in the misjudged.  She probably experienced as much pride in publicly declaring the misjudged a better woman than she was reputed, as that lady would have felt in secretly declaring her to be a worse one.

On the part of Mrs. Conyers, the motives which she brought to the association presented nothing that must be captured and brought down from the heights, she was usually to be explained by mining rather than mounting.  Whatever else she might not have been, she was always ore; never rainbows.

Throughout bird and animal and insect life there runs what is recognized as the law of protective assimilation.  It represents the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be something else as a condition of continuing to be itself.  The rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions that suggest the petals of a corolla, burying its head under its wing and lifting one leg out of sight, becomes a rank, marvellous flower, blooming on too slight a stalk in its marshes.  An insect turns itself into one of the dried twigs of a dead stick.  On the margin of a shadowed pool the frog is hued like moss—­greenness beside greenness.  Mrs. Conyers availed herself of a kind of protective assimilation when she exposed herself to the environment of Mrs. Meredith, adopting devices by which she would be taken for any object in nature but herself.  Two familiar devices were applied to her habiliments and her conversations.  Mrs. Meredith always dressed well to the natural limit of her bountiful years; Mrs. Conyers usually dressed more than well and more than a generation behind hers.  On occasions when she visited Rowan’s unconcealed mother, she allowed time to make regarding herself almost an honest declaration.  Ordinarily she Was a rose nearly ready to drop, which is bound with a thread of its own color to look as much as possible like a bud that is nearly ready to open.

Her conversations were even more assiduously tinged and fashioned by the needs of accommodation.  Sometimes she sat in Mrs. Meredith’s parlors as a soul sick of the world’s vanities, an urban spirit that hungered for country righteousness.  During a walk one day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping willow and recited, “Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition—­” She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the assurance that with her alone she could lay aside all disguises.