“How absurd you are!  Then we’ll stay here.”

Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice two matches.

“There’s Rosa Norton of our company,” she went on.  “Poor, dear old Rosy!  She’s fifty-three—­grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look of anxious mamma.  And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear; but blow her, if she won’t be as Bohemian as anybody.  I’ve seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin.  I got up and went away.”

“But I can’t possibly affect you in that way,” said Alicia, putting her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace.  “I’m not old and I’m not grotesque.”

“No, but—­oh, all right.  After you with the matches, please.”

“I beg your pardon.  How thoughtless of me!  Dear me, mine has gone out.  Do you suppose anything is wrong with them?  Perhaps they’re damp.”

“Trifle dry, if anything,” Hilda returned, with the cigarette between her lips, “but in excellent order, really.”  She took it between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils.  It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day—­she hoped Miss Howe wouldn’t do it again.  But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe’s way of doing it.

“No, you’re not old and grotesque,” Hilda said contemplatively; “you’re young and beautiful.”  The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air.  Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without wincing.  She had less than the common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something different—­a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

“Fairly,” she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be dismissed between them.

“You made a vivid impression here last year,” said Alicia.  She felt delightfully terse and to the point.

“You mean Mr. Lindsay.  Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable.  Do you know him well?”

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them.  Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold—­ it would have annoyed her to know how cold—­with distance.

“He is an old friend of my brother’s,” she said.  Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.  She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.

“Most impressionable,” she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken.  “As to the rest of the people—­bah! you can’t rouse Calcutta.  It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior.  It’s really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised—­made to serve ennobling ends.  But Mr. Lindsay is—­ different.”