“Oh dear, no!  Not thirty.  Twenty-four, I should say.”

Elfrida’s face fell perceptibly.  “Twenty-four!” she exclaimed.  “And I am already twenty!  I shall never catch up to her in four years.  Oh, you have made me so unhappy!  I thought she must be quite old—­forty perhaps.  I was prepared to venerate her.  But twenty-four and good eyebrows!  It is too much.”

Kendal laughed.  “Oh, I say!” he exclaimed, jumping up and bringing a journal from the other side of the room, “if you’re going in for art criticism, here’s something!  Do you see the Decade? The Decade’s article on the pictures in last week’s number fairly brought me back to town.”  He held his brush between his teeth and found the place for her.  “There!  I don’t know who did it, and it was the first thing Miss Cardiff asked me when I put in my appearance there yesterday, so she doesn’t either, though she writes a good deal for the Decade.”

Kendal had gone back to work, and did not see that Elfrida was making an effort of self-control, with a curious exaltation in her eyes.  “I—­I have seen this,” she said presently.

“Capital, isn’t it!”

“Miss Cardiff asked you who wrote it?” she repeated hungrily.

“Yes; she commissioned me to find out, and if he was respectable to bring him there.  Her father said I was to bring him anyway.  So I don’t propose to find out.  The Cardiffs have burned their fingers once or twice already handling obscure genius, and I won’t take the responsibility.  But it’s adorably savage, isn’t it?”

“Do you really like it!” she asked.  It was her first taste of success, and the savor was very sweet.  But she was in an agony of desire to tell him, to tell him immediately, but gracefully, delicately, that she wrote it.  How could she say it, and yet seem uneager, indifferent?  But the occasion must not slip.  It was a miserable moment.

“Immensely,” he replied.

“Then,” she said, with just a little more significance in her voice than she intended, “you would rather not find out?”

He turned and met her shining eyes.  She smiled, and he had an instant of conviction.  “You,” he exclaimed—­“you did it!  Really?”

She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had said.  “Now criticise!” she begged impatiently.

“I can only advise you to follow your own example,” he said gravely.  “It’s rather exuberantly cruel in places.”

“Adorably savage, you said!”

“I wasn’t criticising then.  And I suppose,” he went on, with a shade of awkwardness, “I ought to thank you for all the charming things you put in about me.”

“Ah!” she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug, “don’t say that—­it’s like the others.  But,” she clinched it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, “will you take me to see Miss Cardiff?  I mean,” she added, noting his look of consternation, “will you ask her if I may come?  I forget—­we are in London.”