* * * * *

Victoria’s mind for the rest of the sitting was in a state of abstraction, and she sat so still that Delorme was greatly pleased with her.  At luncheon she was still absent-minded, and Lady Barbara whispered in Gerald Tatham’s ear that Victoria was always a poor hostess, but this time her manners were really impossible.

“But you intend to stay a fortnight, don’t you?” said Gerald, not without malice.

“If I can possibly stay it out.”  The reply was lofty, but the situation, as Gerald knew, was commonplace.  Lady Barbara’s house in town was let for another fortnight, and Duddon’s Castle was more agreeable and more economical than either lodgings or a hotel.

Meanwhile a pair of eyes belonging to the young man whose dinner jacket and black tie had marked him out amid the other male guests of the night before were observing matters with a more subtle and friendly spirit behind them.  Cyril Boden was a Fellow of All Souls, a journalist, an advanced Radical, a charmer, and a fanatic.  He hated no man.  That indeed was the truth.  But he hated the theories and the doings of so many men, that the difference between him and the mere revolutionary was hard to seize.  He had a smooth and ruddy face, in which the eyebrows seemed to be always rising interrogatively; longish hair; stooping shoulders, and an amiable, lazy, mocking look that belied a nature of singular passion, always occupied with the most tremendous problems of life, and afraid of no solution.

He had been overworking himself in the attempt to settle a dock strike, and had come to Duddon to rest.  Victoria was much attached to him in a motherly way, and he to her.  They sparred a good deal; she attacking “agitators” and “demagogues,” he, fierce on “feudal tyranny,” especially when masked in the beauties and amenities of such a place as Duddon.  But they were friends all the same, exchanging the unpaid services of friends.

In the afternoon, before Lydia Penfold appeared, Boden found amusement in teasing Delorme—­an old acquaintance.  Delorme was accustomed to pose in all societies as Whistler’s lawful and only successor.  “Pattern” and “harmony” possessed him; “finish” was only made for fools, and the story-teller in art was the unclean thing.  His ambition, like Whistler’s, was to paint a full length in three days, and hear it hailed a masterpiece.  And, like Whistler, he had no sooner painted it than he scraped it out; which most sitters found discouraging.

Boden, meanwhile, made amends for all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects—­art and divorce.  He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy.  And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal to ethical or poetic emotion.

“Boden admires a painter because he is a good man and pays his washing bills,” drawled Delorme behind his cigarette, from the lazy depths of a garden chair.  “His very colours are virtues, and his pictures must be masterpieces, because he subscribes to the Dogs’ Home, and doesn’t beat his wife.”