CHAPTER II.

“Oh, her gift!” said Alicia Livingstone.  “It is the lowest, isn’t it—­in the scale of human endowment?  Mimicry.”

Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned her eyes and her delicate chin toward Duff Lindsay with the protest.  Lindsay’s cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.

“Mimicry isn’t a fair word,” he said.  “The mimic doesn’t interpret.  He’s a mere thief of expression.  You can always see him behind his stolen mask.  The actress takes a different rank.  This one does, anyway.”

“You’re mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys,” remarked Surgeon-Major Livingstone.

“Mere imitators!” cried Mrs. Barberry.

Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her.  She smiled upon their energy, and, so to speak, disappeared.  It was one of her little ways, and since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with it.

“I’ve met them in London,” she said.  “Oh, I remember one hot little North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes—­and they were always disappointing.  There seemed to be, somehow, no basis—­nothing to go upon.”

She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful, deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined.  That was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will do to go on with.  From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens to find out anything at all.

“You found that they had no selves,” he said, and the manner of his words was encouraging and provocative.  His proposition was obscured to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him.  “But Miss Hilda Howe has one.”

“Is she a lady?” asked Mrs. Barberry.

“I don’t know.  She’s an individual.  I prefer to rest my claim for her on that.”

“Your claim to what?” trembled upon Miss Livingstone’s lips, but she closed them instead and turned her head again to listen to Mrs. Barberry.  The turns of Alicia’s head had a way of punctuating the conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and relief.

“I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather,” Mrs. Barberry said; “I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the Fort, and I said, ‘Never again!’ Fortunately the girls were just out, and not one of them understood, but those poor boys didn’t know where to look!  And no more did I. So disgustingly real.”

Alicia’s eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her lips.