She paused; then she added: 

“I must say it would be rather nice to be the woman he believed in.”

“Tell me something about this Mr. Armine, Doctor Isaacson,” said Lady O’Ryan, who was sitting on the Doctor’s other side, and had caught part of this conversation.  “You know I am always in County Clare, and as ignorant as a violet.  Who is he exactly?”

“A younger brother of Harwich’s, and the next heir to the title.”

“That immensely rich Lord Harwich whose horses have won so many races, and who married Zoe Mulligan, of Chicago, more than ten years ago?”

“Yes.  They’ve never had any children, and Harwich has knocked his health to pieces, so Armine is pretty sure to succeed.  But he’s fairly well off, I suppose, for a bachelor.  When his mother died, she left him her property.”

“And what does he do?”

“He was in the army, but resigned his commission when he came into his land.”

“Why?”

“To look after his people.  He had great ideas about a landlord’s duties to his tenants.”

“O’Ryan’s tenants have enormous ideas about his duties to them.”

“That must be trying.  Armine lived in the country, and made a great many generous experiments—­built model cottages, started rifle ranges, erected libraries, gymnasiums, swimming baths.  In fact, he spent his money royally—­too royally.”

“And were they sick with gratitude?”

“Their thankfulness did not go so far as that.  In fact, some of Armine’s schemes for making people happy met with a good deal of opposition.  Finally there was a tremendous row about a right of way.  The tenants were in the wrong, and Armine was so disgusted at their trying to rob him of what was his, after he had showered benefits upon them, that he let his place and hasn’t been there since.”

“That’s so like people, to ignore libraries and village halls, and shriek for the right to get over a certain stile, or go down a muddy path that leads from nothing to nowhere.”

“The desire of the star for the moth!”

“You call humanity a star?”

“I think there is a great brightness burning in it; don’t you?”

“There seems to be in Mr. Armine, certainly.  What an enthusiastic look he has!  How could he get wrong with his tenants?”

“It may have been his enthusiasm, his great expectations, his ideality.  Perhaps he puzzled his people, asked too much imagination, too much sacred fire from them.  And then he has immense ideas about honesty, and the rights of the individual; and, in fact, about a good many things that seldom bother the head of the average man.”

“Don’t tell me he has developed into a crank,” said Mrs. Derringham.  “There’s something so underbred about crankiness; and the Harwich family have always been essentially aristocrats.”

“I shouldn’t think Armine was a crank, but I do think he is an idealist.  He considers Watts’s allegorical pictures the greatest things in Art that have been done since Botticelli enshrined Purity in paint.  In modern music Elgar’s his man; in modern literature, Tolstoy.  He loves those with ideals, even if their ideals are not his.  I do not say he is an artist.  He is not.  His motto is not ‘Art for art’s sake,’ but ’Art for man’s sake.’”