“You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they are not women;” Duff said.  “I don’t believe their behaviour is a bit more affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the higher mathematics.”

She turned indignant eyes on him.  “Fancy your saying that!  Fancy your having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry!  At what Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?” she said derisively.  “Well, it shows that one can’t trust one’s best friend loose among the conventions!”

He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such matters were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when she added, with apparent inconsistency and real dejection, “It is a hideous bore.”

Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it aside he felt that she was generous.  Yet something in him—­perhaps the primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch impulse to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to say, “He gives up a good deal, doesn’t he, for his present gratification?”

“He gives up everything!  That is the disgusting part of it.  Leander Morris offered him—­but why should I tell you?  It’s humiliating enough in the very back of one’s mind.”

“He is a clever fellow, no doubt.”

“Not too clever to act with me!  Oh, we go beautifully—­we melt, we run together.  He has given me some essential things, and now I can give them back to him.  I begin to think that is what keeps him now.  It must be awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in—­in anybody, and watch it grow.”

“Doubtless,” said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing.  Although she knew his very moderate power of analysis, he seemed to look, with his eyes on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her mouth.  “Well,” he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, “it’s a satisfaction to have you back.  I have been doing nothing, literally, since you went away, but making money and playing tennis.  Existence, as I look back upon it, is connoted by a varying margin of profit and a vast sward.”

She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely, considering the advisability of returning.  “It’s a pity you can’t act,” she said; “then you could come away and let it all go.”

Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed.  “How simple life is to you!” he said.  “But any way, I couldn’t act.”

“Oh, no, you couldn’t, you couldn’t!  You are too intensely absorbent, you are too rigidly individual.  The flame in you would never consent, even for an instant, to be the flame in anybody else—­any of those people who, for the purpose of the stage, are called imaginary.  Never!”

It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was:  “I wish you would go on.  You can’t think how gratifying it is—­after the tennis.”