“My dear!” she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, “have you heard what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a baby?  It was born with four teeth!”

Miss Raeburn’s astonishment fitted the provocation, and the two old friends fell into a gossip on the subject of Lady Winterbourne’s numerous family, which was clearly meant for a tete-a-tete.

“Will you come and look at our tapestry?” said Aldous to his neighbour, after a few nothings had passed between them as to the weather and her walk from Mellor.  “I think you would admire it, and I am afraid my grandfather will be a few minutes yet.  He hoped to get home earlier than this, but his Board meeting was very long and important, and has kept him an unconscionable time.”

Marcella rose, and they moved together towards the south end of the room where a famous piece of Italian Renaissance tapestry entirely filled the wall from side to side.

“How beautiful!” cried the girl, her eyes filling with delight.  “What a delicious thing to live with.”

And, indeed, it was the most adorable medley of forms, tints, suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses.  Both colour and subject were of fairyland.  The golds and browns and pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty.  It was Italy at the great moment—­subtle, rich, exuberant.

Aldous enjoyed her pleasure.

“I thought you would like it; I hoped you would.  It has been my special delight since I was a child, when my mother first routed it out of a garret.  I am not sure that I don’t in my heart prefer it to any of the pictures.”

“The flowers!” said Marcella, absorbed in it—­“look at them—­the irises, the cyclamens, the lilies!  It reminds one of the dreams one used to have when one was small of what it would be like to have flowers enough.  I was at school, you know, in a part of England where one seemed always cheated out of them!  We walked two and two along the straight roads, and I found one here and one there—­but such a beggarly, wretched few, for all one’s trouble.  I used to hate the hard dry soil, and console myself by imagining countries where the flowers grew like this—­yes, just like this, in a gold and pink and blue mass, so that one might thrust one’s hands in and gather and gather till one was really satisfied!  That is the worst of being at school when you are poor!  You never get enough of anything.  One day it’s flowers—­but the next day it is pudding—­and the next frocks.”

Her eye was sparkling, her tongue loosened.  Not only was it pleasant to feel herself beside him, enwrapped in such an atmosphere of admiration and deference, but the artistic sensitive chord in her had been struck, and vibrated happily.