her reputation with such skill that you could scarcely put your finger on the place where the hole had been; and lo! she was reigning in Bedford Park and had all she wanted—­except youth.  Nor did she in the least show the resigned, disillusioned air of women who have but recently lost their youth.  She bore herself just as though she still had no fear of strong lights, and as though she was still the dazzling, dashing blonde of whom John in his earliest twenties used to say, with ingenuous enthusiasm, that she was ’ripping’—­the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson.  An epical creature!

This domestic organism created by Mrs. John inspired George, and instantly he was rapt away in dreams of his own future.  He said to himself again, and more forcibly, that he had a natural taste for luxury and expensiveness, and that he would have the one and practise the other.  He invented gorgeous interiors which would be his and in which he would be paramount and at ease.  He positively yearned for them.  He was impatient to get back home and resume the long labours that would lead him to them.  Every grand adjunct of life must be his, and he could not wait.  Absurd to apprehend that Marguerite would not rise to his dreams!  Of course she would!  She would fit herself perfectly into them, completing them.  She would understand all the artistic aspects of them, because she was an artist; and in addition she would be mistress, wife, hostess, commanding impeccable servants, receiving friends with beauty and unsurpassable sweet dignity, wearing costly frocks and jewels as though she had never worn anything else.  She had the calm power, she had the individuality, to fulfil all his desires for her.  She would be the authentic queen of which Mrs. John was merely the imitation.  He wanted intensely to talk to her about the future....  And then he had the seductive idea of making presentable his bed-sitting-room at Mr. Haim’s.  He saw the room instantaneously transformed; he at once invented each necessary dodge for absolutely hiding during the day the inconvenient fact that it had to serve as a bedroom at night; he refurnished it; he found the money to refurnish it.  And just as he was impatient to get back home in order to work, so he was impatient to get back home in order to transform his chamber into the ideal.  Delay irked him painfully.  And yet he was extremely happy in the excitement of the dreams that ached to be fulfilled.

“Now, Mr. Enwright,” said Mrs. John in an accent to draw honey out of a boulder.  “You haven’t told me what you think of it.”

Enwright was wandering about by himself.

“He’s coming on with his lithographs,” he replied, as if after a decision.  “One or two of these are rather interesting.”

“Oh!  I don’t mean the lithographs.  You know those are all Jack’s affairs.  I mean—­well, the room.  Now do pay me a compliment.”

The other guests listened.

Enwright gave a little self-conscious smile, characteristic of him in these dilemmas, half kind and half malicious.