only thing she was bent upon making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of Miss Livingstone’s effort to receive her as if she had been anybody else.  Alicia was hardly aware of what she wanted to conceal, unless it was her impression that Miss Howe’s dress was cut a trifle too low in the neck, that she was almost too effective in that cream and yellow to be quite right.  Alicia remembered afterwards, to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of intercourse with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set Celine at her—­with such a foundation to work upon, what could Celine not have done?  She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room tones of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery, and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women and a little furniture.  A consciousness stood in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazaar rode on long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they might have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and acknowledged no demand for more than the smile.

The cutlets had come before Hilda’s impression was at the back of her head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her elbow on the table.  They had found a portrait-painter.

“He has such an eye,” said Alicia, “for the possibilities of character.”

“Such an eye that he develops them.  I know one man he painted.  I suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime he and everybody else had forgotten about it.  All but Salter.  Salter re-created it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a lodging behind the man’s wrinkles.  I saw the picture.  It was fantastic—­psychologically.”

“Psychology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know,” Alicia said.  “Do let him give you a little more.  It’s only Moselle.”  She felt quite direct, and simple, too, in uttering her postulate.  Her eyes had a friendly, unembarrassed look; there was nothing behind them but the joy of talking intelligently about Salter.

Hilda did not even glance away.  She looked at her hostess instead, with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have mistaken it to be insincere.  It was part of her that she could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in Alicia’s.  Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent quality.

“It’s everything to everything, don’t you think?  And especially, thank Heaven, to my trade.”  Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms.  That was the case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.