im now."

There seemed to be a trace of weariness in the girl's voice as she
answered, and Lady Garnett glanced at her sharply before she let her
eyes continue their task of wandering in a kind of absent scrutiny
of the sculptured exhibits in the room.

"But of course not.... How terrible all these great plaster figures
are, and the busts, too! They are so dreary, they have the air of
being made for a cemetery. Don't they make you think of tombstones
and mausoleums?"

Eve looked at her a little wonderingly.

"Are they very bad? Do you know, I rather like them. Not so much as
the pictures, of course; but still I think some of them are
charming, though I am rather glad Dick isn't a sculptor. Don't you
like that? What is it--Bacchus on a panther?"

"My dear, you are quite right," said the old lady decisively,
dropping her tortoise-shell lorgnon into her lap, and suppressing a
yawn. "Only, it is you who are charming! I must go to the Grosvenor
as soon as it opens to see if your clever husband, who seems to be
able to paint everything and everybody, has done you justice.... But
you mustn't sit talking to an old grumbler like me any longer. Go
back to your picture; Mr. Dollond will pilot you. And if you
encounter Mary on the way, tell her that a certain discontented old
lady of her acquaintance wants to be taken home. Au revoir."

About five minutes later Mary Masters found her aunt half asleep.
The paint had made her stupid, she said. She could understand now
why painters did not improve as they grew older; it was the smell of
the paint.

"Ah," she said, as they passed out into the busy whirl of
Piccadilly, "how glad I shall be to get back to my Masons and
Corots. Though I like that pretty little Mrs. Lightmark.... Poor
Philip! Now tell me whom you saw. Charles Sylvester, of course? But
no, I am too sleepy now; you shall tell me all about it after
dinner."

It was six o'clock before the Colonel was able to deposit his bulky,
military person rather stiffly on a cushioned seat, and to remove
his immaculate silk hat, with an expression of weary satisfaction.
He had devoted all the sunny spring afternoon, (when he might have
been at Hurlingham, or playing whist at the "Rag"), to making his
way, laboriously and apologetically, from room to room in search of
friends and acquaintances, whom, when found, he would convoy
strategically into the immediate vicinity of No. 37 in the First
Room.

"My nephew's picture," he ex