For some moments after he had finished Alison did not reply.

“What is his number in Dalton Street?” she asked.

Hodder informed her.

He could not read in her face whether she suspected that he could have told her more.  And in spite of an inordinate, human joy in being again in her presence, his desire to hide from her that which had taken place within him, and the inability he felt to read his future, were instinctive:  the more so because of the very spontaneity they had achieved at their first meeting.  As a man, he shrank from confessing to her, however indirectly, the fact that she herself was so vital an element in his disillusionment.  For the conversation in the garden had been the immediate cause of the inner ferment ending in his resolution to go away, and had directed him, by logical steps, to the encounter in the church with Mrs. Garvin.

“You have not yet finished the garden?” he asked.  “I imagined you back in the East by this time.”

“Oh, I am procrastinating,” she replied.  “It is a fit of sheer laziness.  I ought to be elsewhere, but I was born without a conscience.  If I had one I should try to quiet it by reminding it that I am fulfilling a long-delayed promise—­I am making a garden for Mrs. Larrabbee.  You know her, of course, since she is a member of your congregation.”

“Yes, I know her,” he assented.  And his mind was suddenly filled with vivid colour,—­cobalt seas, and arsenic-green spruces with purple cones, cardinal-striped awnings that rattled in the salt breeze, and he saw once more the panorama of the life which had passed from him and the woman in the midst of it.  And his overwhelming thought was of relief that he had somehow escaped.  In spite of his unhappiness now, he would not have gone back.  He realized for the first time that he had been nearer annihilation then than to-day.

“Grace isn’t here to bother me with the ideas she has picked up in Europe and catalogued,” Alison continued.

“Catalogued!” Hodder exclaimed, struck by the pertinency of the word.

“Yes.  Did you ever know anybody who had succeeded half so well in piecing together and absorbing into a harmonized whole all the divergent, artificial elements that enter into the conventional world to-day?  Her character might be called a triumph of synthesis.  For she has actually achieved an individuality—­that is what always surprises me when I think of her.  She has put the puzzle picture together, she has become a person.”

He remembered, with a start, that this was the exact word Mrs. Larrabbee had used about Alison Parr.  If he had searched the world, he could not have found a greater contrast than that between these two women.  And when she spoke again, he was to be further struck by her power of logical insight.

“Grace wants me because she thinks I have become the fashion—­for the same reason that Charlotte Plimpton wants me.  Only there is this difference—­Grace will know the exact value of what I shall have done.  Not that she thinks me a Le Notre”—­Alison laughed—­“What I mean is, she sees behind, she sees why it is fashionable to have a garden, since she has worked out the values of that existence.  But there!” Alison added, with a provocative touch that did not escape him, “I am picking your parishioners to pieces again.”