only confirmed the frivolous persons whom she tried to convert to “social service,” in their frivolity.  After a quarter of an hour’s conversation with her, Tatham was generally dumb, and as nearly rude as his temperament allowed.  While, as to his own small efforts, his cottages, County Council, and the rest, no blandishments would have drawn from him a word about them; although, like many of us, Lady Barbara would gladly have purchased leave to talk about her own achievements by a strictly moderate amount of listening to other people’s.

On his other side sat a very different person—­the sweet-faced lady, whose boy of fourteen sitting opposite kept up with her through dinner a shy telegraphy of eye and smile.  They were evidently alone in the world, and everything to each other.  She was a widow—­a Mrs. Edward Manisty, whose husband, a brilliant but selfish man of letters, had died some four years before this date.  His wife had never found out that he was selfish; her love had haloed him; though she had plenty of character of her own.  She herself was an American, a New Englander by birth, carrying with her still the perfume of a quiet life begun among the hills of Vermont, and in sight of the Adirondacks; a life fundamentally Puritan and based on Puritan ideals; yet softened and expanded by the modern forces of art, travel, and books.  Lucy Manisty had attracted her husband, when he, a weary cosmopolitan, had met her first in Rome, by just this touch of something austerely sweet, like the scent of lavender or dewy grass; and she had it still—­mingled with a kind humour—­in her middle years, which were so lonely but for her boy.  She and Victoria Tatham had made friends on the warm soil of Italy, and through a third person, a rare and charming woman, whose death had first made them really known to each other.

“I never saw anything so attractive!” Mrs. Manisty was murmuring in Tatham’s ear.

He followed the direction of her eyes, and his fair skin reddened.

“She is very pretty, isn’t she?”

“Very—­like a Verrocchio angel—­who has been to college!  She is an artist?”

“She paints.  She admires Delorme.”

“That one can see.  And he admires her!”

“We—­my mother—­wants him to paint her.”

“He will—­if he knows his own business.”

“A Miss Penfold?” said Lady Barbara, putting up her eyeglass.  “You say she paints.  The modern girl must always do something! My girls have been brought up for home.”

A remark that drove Tatham into a rash defence of the modern girl to which he was quite unequal, and in which indeed he was half-hearted, for his fundamental ideas were quite as old-fashioned as Lady Barbara’s.  But Lydia, for him, was of no date; only charm itself, one with all the magic and grace that had ever been in the world, or would be.

Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him—­a bright, signalling look, only to tell him how hugely well she was getting on with Delorme.  He smiled in return, but inwardly he was discontented.  Always this gay camaraderie—­like a boy’s.  Not the slightest tremor in it.  Not a touch of consciousness—­or of sex.  He could not indeed have put it so.  All he knew was that he was always thirstily seeking something she showed no signs of giving him.