’Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman’s cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet.  She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries assigned to them.  Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth’s and an unutterable mawkish thing of Halford’s—­a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown, gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust young women in a “light which never was on sea or land.”  “You could count all the figures in the first,” she said, “it was so lifelike, so real;” and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it.  I looked at Forbes with some amusement; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of the White Lady, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton’s liking of the worst art in England!  Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting!  I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.

’"Oh, you couldn’t,” he said with a groan, “you couldn’t like that ballroom,—­and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us!  Well, there must be something in it,—­there must be something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,—­I daresay there is; we’re so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things.  If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of taste, if both of them weren’t as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them!  Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it’s really not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn’t.  I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford’s figures don’t join in the middle, and that Forth’s men and women are as flat as my hand—­there isn’t a back among them!  And then the taste, and the colour, and the clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment!  No, I don’t think I can stand it.  I am all for people getting enjoyment where they can,” with a defiant look at me, “and snapping their fingers at the critics.  But one must draw the line somewhere.  There’s some art that’s out of court from the beginning.”

’I couldn’t resist it.

’"Don’t listen to him, Miss Bretherton,” I cried.  “If I were you I wouldn’t let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to feel; defend your feeling against him!  It’s worth more than his criticisms.”

’Forbes’s eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white brows.  Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there’s no denying it.