‘My uncle is very disturbed,’ she said.  ’Is the news—­if I am not very indiscreet in inquiring?’

‘I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,’ Dacier replied.

‘I am only affected by living with one who does,’ Miss Asper observed, and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral attractiveness in addition to physical beauty.  Her water-colour sketches were on her uncle’s walls:  the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed her.  She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque of the nunnery.  She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.

‘It’s a dusty game for ladies,’ Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled by it.

And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a pathos in a man’s discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower’s environments.

The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by contrast.  His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married:  who, by the way, contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from their traffic with the masculine world:  often—­if we did but know!—­a parrot-repetition of the last male visitor’s remarks.  But that which the fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own.

She too is her own:  or vowed but to one.  She is on all sides impressive in purity.  The world worships her as its perfect pearl:  and we are brought refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.

By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance Asper celestially.  As he was well aware, she had long preferred him—­the reserved among many pleading pressing suitors.  Her steady faithfulness had fed on the poorest crumbs.

He ventured to express the hope that she was well.

‘Yes,’ she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his concern in so humble a person.

‘You look a little pale,’ he said.

She coloured like a sea-water shell.  ’I am inclined to paleness by nature.’

Her uncle disturbed them.  Lunch was ready.  He apologized for the absence of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who kept house for them.  Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister.  Dacier found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite.  He mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with him at midday:  and Miss Asper, supporting him in that effort, said benevolently:  ’Gentlemen should eat; they have so many fatigues and troubles.’  She herself did not like to be seen eating in public.  Her lips opened to the morsels, as with a bird’s bill, though with none of the pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry.

‘But now, I say, positively, how about that article?’ said Quintin.