ll the same I don't think, you know," my interlocutress said, "that
Nina will have made her a scene or that, whatever we do, she'll ever make
her one. That isn't the way it will happen, for she's exactly as
conscientious as Mrs. Brash."

"Then what is the way?" I asked.

"It will just happen in silence."

"And what will 'it,' as you call it, be?"

"Isn't that what we want really to see?"

"Well," I replied after a turn or two about, "whether we want it or not
it's exactly what we _shall_ see; which is a reason the more for
fancying, between the pair there--in the quiet exquisite house, and full
of superiorities and suppressions as they both are--the extraordinary
situation. If I said just now that it's too late to do anything but
assent it's because I've taken the full measure of what happened at my
studio. It took but a few moments--but she tasted of the tree."

My companion wondered. "Nina?"

"Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered, while I took yet
another turn, to a sort of agitation. Our attitude was a responsibility.

But I had suggested something else to my friend, who appeared for a
moment detached. "Should you say she'll hate her worse if she _doesn't_
see?"

"Lady Beldonald? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than if she does? Ah
I give _that_ up!" I laughed. "But what I can tell you is why I hold
that, as I said just now, we can do most. We can do this: we can give to
a harmless and sensitive creature hitherto practically disinherited--and
give with an unexpectedness that will immensely add to its price--the
pure joy of a deep draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed
personal triumph in our superior sophisticated world."

Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden eloquence. Oh it will
be beautiful!

CHAPTER V

Well, that's what, on the whole and in spite of everything, it really
was. It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a
regular panorama of those occasions that were to minister to the view
from which I had so for a moment extracted a lyric inspiration. I see
Mrs. Brash on each of these occasions practically enthroned and
surrounded and more or less mobbed; see the hurrying and the nudging and
the pressing and the staring; see the people "making up" and introduced,
and catch the word when they have had their turn; hear it above all, the
great one--"Ah yes, the famous Holbein!"--passed about with that
perfection of prom