that gained in sweetness and lost its
chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.

"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one
you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as
Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening in the drawing-room after
dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the
world. Milly chatted with great affability. Dick, as Christina so often
reminded her, was a dear. No one could have less suggested shackles.

"Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what do _you_ find to like in
Christina?" Even in her new tolerance there lurked touches of the old
irrepressible disdain.

Dick, twisting his moustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean that I'm
not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired.
Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of purely
impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire
upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like
Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly delightful, but that Dick should
seem to like what she liked for the same reasons irked her a little. It
was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her favourite Brahms
Rhapsody. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain
of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms
Rhapsody, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sedative
after a day's hard riding? And how could Dick really like Christina? If
he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them
the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of taste--a link that
she had never recognized.

"I think that we could only like the same things in a very different
way," she confessed. "Why do you like Christina?"

He did not reply at once, and she went on, looking at him, smiling--they
were sitting side by side on a little sofa; "it isn't her charm, for
you think her ugly."

"Yes; she's ugly certainly," Dick assented, quite as dully as she had
hoped he would, "though her figure is rather neat."

Milly's smile shifted to its habitual kindly irony. "She is subtle and
delicate and sensitive," she said, rehearsing to herself as much as to
him all the reasons why Dick could not really like Christina. "Her
truths would never blunder and her silences never bore." "As Dick's
did," was in her mind. It was cruel to be so conscious of the contrast
when he lo