er. She would
love to hear.

To the flattered relief of a vigilant President, who had observed the
guest of honour's restless movement, Hubert settled once more in his
chair.

He would stay ... just a little.

CHAPTER XI

PINK PAPERS AND ST. ANTHONY

It is both easy and comforting to divide men simply into opposites.
Honest, dishonest; truthful, lying; clean, dirty;--what a lot of worry
it undoubtedly prevents. You trust one person all the way, another
nowhere; you tell your secrets to the first and to the second nothing;
it is so simple that few people can resist it, when they come to life.
And it is good enough for working purposes.

But in reality it is not so. A man all white or all black is but
rarely met: the last is soon removed, the first impossible for common
use. Man was devised from a more subtle palette; and if in all the
millions of faces no two are alike, that is yet truer, said about the
heart. The man you trust so freely has his see-saw moments, like
anybody else, and if as a rule he lands the right end down, it may have
been your very confidence that lent him weight. It is the same with
all. They must be entered for convenience beneath the colour which
they most display, but every one of them is a true moral rainbow and
much more. Take it all in all, we humans are the most mixed thing that
any one has ever yet invented: the reason why some scorn all other
hobbies or amusements, so long as there is Man.

Geoffrey Alison was an especially odd mixture--all of course kept
rigidly inside. To the mere eye he was, like most, quite simple,
almost to the point of dulness. Oh yes; I see, yes; the artistic type;
a gentleman though; trustworthy but slack; quite modest although jolly
clever; pretty much of a white man... But inwardly he was a thing to
watch because his types conflicted, and that ends with fireworks.

He joined the artist's soul--a real love for the beautiful and
noble--to what perhaps may be most easily described as a pink-paper
mind. He could sit and gaze happily for hours at a Corregio,
forgetting the plush benches and the noisy tourists, utterly absorbed;
he found a joy that was almost physical in a sudden landscape or the
moon which breaks loose from its clouds and gleams on a rough sea; he
would watch with a smile of pleasure the way of a woman with her child
or a child with its toy; he shrank with loathing from all that was
ugly, sordid--the sight of needless miser