details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations.  The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained.  She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents.  He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would never give more than the exact measure; he would always fight for the risen Christ, but he would never have followed the humble bearer of the Cross.  His strength and weakness were the kind which had profoundly influenced her life.  He represented in her world the conservative principle, the accepted standard, the acknowledged authority, custom, stability, reason, and moderation.

As he sat down in front of the fire, he looked at her with a gentle possessive gaze.

“Of course you have never sold a print,” he remarked in a laughing tone, and she responded as flippantly.

“Of course!”

“Why didn’t you call it a collection?”

“Because people wouldn’t come.”

“Then why didn’t you keep them at home where you have so much that is fine?”

She laughed.  “Because people couldn’t come.  I mean the people I don’t know.  I have a fancy for the people I have never met.”

“On the principle that the unknown is the desirable.”

She nodded.  “And that the desirable is the unattainable.”

His gray eyes were warmed by a fugitive glow.  “I shouldn’t have put it that way in your case.  You appear to have everything.”

“Do I?  Well, that twists the sentence backward.  Shall we say that the attainable is the undesirable?”

“Surely not.  Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things?  Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding?  Do you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become meaningless?”

“I am not sure.  Wouldn’t it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?” She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.

He shook his head.  “I am denied sugar.  Has it ever occurred to you that middle age ought to be called the age of denial?” Then his tone changed.  “But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are?  You have the collector’s instinct and the means to gratify it.  To discover with you is to possess—­don’t you understand the blessing of that?  You love beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can only peer through the windows of her palace.”