“I have never known anything like those snow-peaks for sailing under false colours,” Peter said.  “I have seen them every colour of the calendar, except their native white.”

“You must n’t blame the poor things,” pleaded the Duchessa.  “They can’t help it.  It’s all along o’ the distance and the atmosphere and the sun.”

She closed her fan, with which she had been more or less idly playing throughout their dialogue, and replaced it on the table.  Among the books there—­French books, for the most part, in yellow paper—­Peter saw, with something of a flutter (he could never see it without something of a flutter), the grey-and-gold binding of “A Man of Words.”

The Duchessa caught his glance.

“Yes,” she said; “your friend’s novel.  I told you I had been re-reading it.”

“Yes,” said he.

“And—­do you know—­I ’m inclined to agree with your own enthusiastic estimate of it?” she went on.  “I think it’s extremely—­but extremely—­clever; and more—­very charming, very beautiful.  The fatal gift of beauty!”

And her smile reminded him that the application of the tag was his own.

“Yes,” said he.

“Its beauty, though,” she reflected, “is n’t exactly of the obvious sort—­is it?  It does n’t jump at you, for instance.  It is rather in the texture of the work, than on the surface.  One has to look, to see it.”

“One always has to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing,” he safely generalised.  But then—­he had put his foot in the stirrup—­his hobby bolted with him.  “It takes two to make a beautiful object.  The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist.  The artist does his work—­the beholder must do his.  They are collaborators.  Each must be the other’s equal; and they must also be like each other—­with the likeness of opposites, of complements.  Art, in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity.  The kind of beauty that jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of—­is the skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n’t really beauty at all—­it is only an approximation to beauty—­it may be only a simulacrum of it.”

Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest, with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something else—­perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but interest was easily predominant.

“Yes,” she assented . . . .  But then she pursued her own train of ideas.  “And—­with you—­I particularly like the woman —­Pauline.  I can’t tell you how much I like her.  I—­it sounds extravagant, but it’s true—­I can think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so well—­who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me.  Her wit—­her waywardness —­her tenderness—­her generosity—­everything.  How did your friend come by his conception of her?  She’s as real to me as any woman I have ever known she’s more real to me than most of the women I know—­she’s absolutely real, she lives, she breathes.  Yet I have never known a woman resembling her.  Life would be a merrier business if one did know women resembling her.  She seems to me all that a woman ought ideally to be.  Does your friend know women like that—­the lucky man?  Or is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?”