“I don’t know when to believe you.  He talks about her quite freely, and—­and so do I. She is really interesting in her way.”

“And in perspective.”

“Don’t be odiously smart.  He and Stephen”—­her glance was tentative—­“have made it up.”

“Oh!”

“He admits now that Stephen was justified, from his point of view.  But of course that is easy enough when you have come off best.”

“Of course.”

“Hilda, what do you think?”

“Oh, I think it’s damnable—­you have always known what I think.  Have you seen him lately—­I mean your cousin?”

“He lunched with us yesterday.  He was more enthusiastic than ever about you.”

“I wish you could tell me that he hadn’t mentioned my name.  I don’t want his enthusiasm.  The pit gives one that.”

“Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of—­of what it ought to be?  What is the principal part of it?  Not enthusiasm—­adoration?”

“Goodness, no!  Something quite different and quite simple—­too simple to explain.  Besides, it is a thing that requires the completest ignorance to discuss comfortably.  Do you want me to vivisect my soul?  You yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?”

“Oh,” protested Alicia, “I wasn’t thinking about myself,” and at the same moment the door opened and Hilda said, “Ah, Mr. Lindsay!”

There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff’s response to Miss Howe’s greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a difference, and that it would be necessary to find other things to say.  He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish her tea before she went.  Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and sugar.  Alicia waited; it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the tapestries until some reviving circumstance should bring her out again, a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and comments.  She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that.  You know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections.  Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the tea-pot, the conviction visited her that a sex three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.

“It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible,” Lindsay said; “that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent.”

“I don’t know how he can help it now.  But I have to be very firm with him.  He’s on his knees to me to do Ibsen.  I tell him I will if he’ll combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts.  The only way it would go, in this capital.”

“Oh, do produce Ibsen,” Alicia exclaimed.  “I’ve never seen one of his plays—­doesn’t it sound terrible?”

“If people will elect to live upon a coral strand—­oh, I should like to, for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a scratch company.  He must have equal merit, or there’s no meaning.  You see, he makes none of the vulgar appeals.  It would be a tame travesty—­nobody could redeem it alone.  You must keep to the old situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia.”