she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.  And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the “Arabian Nights.”  A pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.  He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.  At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.  But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she liked it.  For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.  And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or inexplicable in Smith’s chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches of Moon.  Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith’s manners were as courteous as they were unconventional.  She said he was “a real gentleman,” by which she simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.  She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while every one else was talking at once.  At least, the only other exception was Rosamund’s companion, Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort.  Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.  Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.  Innocent Smith seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure of making her talk.  He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed; if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure, and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.  But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring.  Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls, she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth, which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money, and Diana in the mere guarding of it.  Smith looked at her again and again.  Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way—­which was really the right way.  She had the knack of saying everything with her face:  her silence was a sort of steady applause.