ys find the white
pagodas," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I shouldn't have
supposed that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to
realise it, too, and to follow her lead."

"It's not that they realise it," the old lady interpreted, salting her
scone; "it's something deeper than realisation. It's instinct--the
instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would
probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly
know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their
credit. And then since she is poor and they--some of them--rich, their
copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and
Cicely, to some people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It has very
much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.

Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather
angry with Gwendolen.

"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it.
Has it gone on for long?"

"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that
time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,--you remember the dreadful
epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze
into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and
quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in
Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and
bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so.--It's
wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct
thing.--Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered
how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year
or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion
and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was
amused when I first saw Japanese prints on some one else's green walls
and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by
degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in
Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red
lacquer and the glass and that beautiful old set of cane-seated
furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had
white walls or a scrap of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a
bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the
white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for
la