“That’s saying a good deal, isn’t it?” commented Dr. Livingstone, vaguely aware of an ironical intention.  “By Jove! yes.”

“Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn’t he?” Mrs. Barberry said.  “Such a magnificent head.  I adore him in Shakespeare.”

“He knows the conventions, and uses them with security,” Lindsay replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air, demanded—­

“Is the story true?”

“The story of their relations?  I suppose there are fifty.  One of them is.”

Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a reminiscence of amateur theatricals.  “Their relations!” she murmured to Dr. Livingstone.  “What awful things to talk about!”

“The story I mean,” Alicia explained, “is to the effect that Mr. Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her passion for her art—­I mean, of course, her affections—­”

“My dear girl, we know what you mean,” cried Mrs. Barberry, entering a protest as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.

“And precisely the reverse happened.”

“One imagines it was something like that,” Lindsay said.

“Oh, did she know about the bet?” cried Mrs. Barberry.

“That’s as you like to believe.  I fancy she knew about the man,” Lindsay contributed again.

“Tables turned, eh?  Daresay it served him right,” remarked Dr. Livingstone.  “If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs. Barberry, we ought to be off?”

“He is going to show me a bacillus,” Mrs. Barberry announced with enthusiasm.  “Plague, or cholera, or something really bad.  He caught it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me—­wasn’t it dear of him!  Good-bye, you nice thing”—­Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia—­ “Good-bye, Mr. Lindsay.  Fancy—­a live bacillus from Hong Kong!  I should like it better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still—­ goodbye.”

With the lady’s departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the room, and the two people who were left.  Things fell into their places, one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in Alicia’s hair and in her skirt.  Little meanings attached themselves—­to oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries.  The air became full of agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given forth again with a delicacy more vague.  Lindsay sometimes thought of the bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a trifle gross and material.  Certainly as she sat there in her grace and slenderness and pale clear tints—­there was an effect