“Lady Beldonald?  Doesn’t see what we see, you mean, than if she does?  Ah I give that up!” I laughed.  “But what I can tell you is why I hold that, as I said just now, we can do most.  We can do this:  we can give to a harmless and sensitive creature hitherto practically disinherited—­and give with an unexpectedness that will immensely add to its price—­the pure joy of a deep draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed personal triumph in our superior sophisticated world.”

Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden eloquence.  Oh it will be beautiful!

CHAPTER V

Well, that’s what, on the whole and in spite of everything, it really was.  It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a regular panorama of those occasions that were to minister to the view from which I had so for a moment extracted a lyric inspiration.  I see Mrs. Brash on each of these occasions practically enthroned and surrounded and more or less mobbed; see the hurrying and the nudging and the pressing and the staring; see the people “making up” and introduced, and catch the word when they have had their turn; hear it above all, the great one—­“Ah yes, the famous Holbein!”—­passed about with that perfection of promptitude that makes the motions of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep.  Nothing would be easier of course than to tell the whole little tale with an eye only for that silly side of it.  Great was the silliness, but great also as to this case of poor Mrs. Brash, I will say for it, the good nature.  Of course, furthermore, it took in particular “our set,” with its positive child-terror of the banal, to be either so foolish or so wise; though indeed I’ve never quite known where our set begins and ends, and have had to content myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner:  “Oh it’s bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent!” Mrs. Brash never sat to me; she absolutely declined; and when she declared that it was quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation invited her, I quite took this as she meant it; before we had gone very far our understanding, hers and mine, was complete.  Her attitude was as happy as her success was prodigious.  The sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, toward muffling their domestic tension.  All it was thus in her power to say—­and I heard of a few cases of her having said it—­was that she was sure I would have painted her beautifully if she hadn’t prevented me.  She couldn’t even tell the truth, which was that I certainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn’t; and she never could mention the subject at all before that personage.  I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to, reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends at home.