with any quickened pulsation of his own vanity. It was responsive

admiration of the life she embodied, the young purity and richness
of which appeared to imply that real success was to resemble THAT,

to live, to bloom, to present the perfection of a fine type, not to
have hammered out headachy fancies with a bent back at an ink-

stained table. While her grey eyes rested on him - there was a
wideish space between these, and the division of her rich-coloured

hair, so thick that it ventured to be smooth, made a free arch
above them - he was almost ashamed of that exercise of the pen

which it was her present inclination to commend. He was conscious
he should have liked better to please her in some other way. The

lines of her face were those of a woman grown, but the child
lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth.

Above all she was natural - that was indubitable now; more natural
than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic

toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what
he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that

sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified;
for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary

nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and a
look as if the satyrs had toyed with her hair, made him shrink not

as a man of starch and patent leather, but as a man potentially
himself a poet or even a faun. The girl was really more candid

than her costume, and the best proof of it was her supposing her
liberal character suited by any uniform. This was a fallacy, since

if she was draped as a pessimist he was sure she liked the taste of
life. He thanked her for her appreciation - aware at the same time

that he didn't appear to thank her enough and that she might think
him ungracious. He was afraid she would ask him to explain

something he had written, and he always winced at that - perhaps
too timidly - for to his own ear the explanation of a work of art

sounded fatuous. But he liked her so much as to feel a confidence
that in the long run he should be able to show her he wasn't rudely

evasive. Moreover she surely wasn't quick to take offence, wasn't
irritable; she could be trusted to wait. So when he said to her,

"Ah don't talk of anything I've done, don't talk of it HERE;
there's another man in the house who's the actuality!" - when he

uttered this short sincere protest it was with the sense that she
would see in the words neither mock humility nor the impatience of

a successful man bored with praise.
"You mean Mr. St. George - isn't he delightful?"

Paul Overt met her eyes, which had a cool morning-light that would
have half-broken his heart if he hadn't been so young. "Alas I

don't know him. I only admire him at a distance."
"Oh you must know him - he wants so to talk to you," returned Miss

Fancourt, who evidently had the habit of saying the things that, by
her quick calculation, would give people pleasure. Paul saw how

she would always calculate on everything's being simple between
others.

"I shouldn't have supposed he knew anything about me," he
professed.

"He does then - everything. And if he didn't I should be able to
tell him."

"To tell him everything?" our friend smiled.
"You talk just like the people in your book!" she answered.

"Then they must all talk alike."
She thought a moment, not a bit disconcerted. "Well, it must be so

difficult. Mr. St. George tells me it IS - terribly. I've tried
too - and I find it so. I've tried to write a novel."

"Mr. St. George oughtn't to discourage you," Paul went so far as to
say.

"You do much more - when you wear that expression."
"Well, after all, why try to be an artist?" the young man pursued.

"It's so poor - so poor!"
"I don't know what you mean," said Miss Fancourt, who looked grave.

"I mean as compared with being a person of action - as living your
works."

"But what's art but an intense life - if it be real?" she asked.
"I think it's the only one - everything else is so clumsy!" Her

companion laughed, and she brought out with her charming serenity
what next struck her. "It's so interesting to meet so many

celebrated people."
"So I should think - but surely it isn't new to you."

"Why I've never seen any one - any one: living always in Asia."
The way she talked of Asia somehow enchanted him. "But doesn't

that continent swarm with great figures? Haven't you administered
provinces in India and had captive rajahs and tributary princes

chained to your car?"
It was as if she didn't care even SHOULD he amuse himself at her

cost. "I was with my father, after I left school to go out there.
It was delightful being with him - we're alone together in the

world, he and I - but there was none of the society I like best.
One never heard of a picture - never of a book, except bad ones."

"Never of a picture? Why, wasn't all life a picture?"
She looked over the delightful place where they sat. "Nothing to

compare to this. I adore England!" she cried.
It fairly stirred in him the sacred chord. "Ah of course I don't

deny that we must do something with her, poor old dear, yet."
"She hasn't been touched, really," said the girl.

"Did Mr. St. George say that?"
There was a small and, as he felt, harmless spark of irony in his

question; which, however, she answered very simply, not noticing
the insinuation. "Yes, he says England hasn't been touched - not

considering all there is," she went on eagerly. "He's so
interesting about our country. To listen to him makes one want so

to do something."
"It would make ME want to," said Paul Overt, feeling strongly, on

the instant, the suggestion of what she said and that of the
emotion with which she said it, and well aware of what an

incentive, on St. George's lips, such a speech might be.
"Oh you - as if you hadn't! I should like so to hear you talk

together," she added ardently.
"That's very genial of you; but he'd have it all his own way. I'm

prostrate before him."
She had an air of earnestness. "Do you think then he's so

perfect?"
"Far from it. Some of his later books seem to me of a queerness -

!"
"Yes, yes - he knows that."

Paul Overt stared. "That they seem to me of a queerness - !"
"Well yes, or at any rate that they're not what they should be. He

told me he didn't esteem them. He has told me such wonderful
things - he's so interesting."

There was a certain shock for Paul Overt in the knowledge that the
fine genius they were talking of had been reduced to so explicit a

confession and had made it, in his misery, to the first comer; for
though Miss Fancourt was charming what was she after all but an

immature girl encountered at a country-house? Yet precisely this
was part of the sentiment he himself had just expressed: he would

make way completely for the poor peccable great man not because he
didn't read him clear, but altogether because he did. His

consideration was half composed of tenderness for superficialities
which he was sure their perpetrator judged privately, judged more

ferociously than any one, and which represented some tragic
intellectual secret. He would have his reasons for his psychology

e fleur de peau, and these reasons could only be cruel ones, such
as would make him dearer to those who already were fond of him.