ally, as Miss
Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led him back to
the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation for a
wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I felt it
might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic
speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse of
Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne
thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs. Gisburn's
welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it
frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting": on that point
I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just
because she was _not_ interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that
I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by
interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the
hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note
what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss
Croft) was having on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who
scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his
wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the
latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was
buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a
discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of the
axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely
appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over
from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my
enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every form of beauty."

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things of
him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me now was
that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so
often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal note that
robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it became apparent
that he was fond of Mrs. G