She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her eyes of all illusions.  Then she turned away and took her usual seat beside her work-table.  From where she sat she could look down the empty elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to see her husband’s figure advancing.  She would see it presently—­she would see it for many years to come.  She had a sudden aching sense of the length of the years that stretched before her.  Strange that one who was not young should still, in all likelihood, have so long to live!

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would ever change in it.  She would certainly live and die in Wentworth.  And meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the usual obligations.  As the word flitted through her brain she remembered that she had still to put the finishing touches to the paper she was to read the next afternoon at the meeting of the Higher Thought Club.

The book she had been reading lay face downward beside her, where she had left it an hour ago.  She took it up, and slowly and painfully, like a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the rest of the sentence: 

—­“and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing of the transverse and diagonal ribs, which are so arranged as to give a convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid.”

THE VERDICT

I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius—­though a good fellow enough—­so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera.  (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

“The height of his glory”—­that was what the women called it.  I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing—­his last Chicago sitter—­deploring his unaccountable abdication.  “Of course it’s going to send the value of my picture ’way up; but I don’t think of that, Mr. Rickham—­the loss to Arrt is all I think of.”  The word, on Mrs. Thwing’s lips, multiplied its rs as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors.  And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned.  Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn’s “Moon-dancers” to say, with tears in her eyes:  “We shall not look upon its like again”?

Well!—­even through the prism of Hermia’s tears I felt able to face the fact with equanimity.  Poor Jack Gisburn!  The women had made him—­it was fitting that they should mourn him.  Among his own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur.  Professional jealousy?  Perhaps.  If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome “obituary” on Jack—­one of those showy articles stocked with random technicalities that I have heard (I won’t say by whom) compared to Gisburn’s painting.  And so—­his resolve being apparently irrevocable—­the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of “Gisburns” went up.