rk. I should think his things had been written, for
the most part, in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness,
following on a kind of tumult. Don't you think so? I suppose London is a
tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the
country, must be much better for working them up. Does he get many of
his impressions in London, do you think?" I proceeded from point to point
in this malign inquiry, simply because my hostess, who probably thought
me a very pushing and talkative young man, gave me time; for when I
paused--I have not represented my pauses--she simply continued to
let her eyes wander, and, with her long fair fingers, played with the
medallion on her neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was
obliged to say something, and what she said was that she had not the
least idea where her husband got his impressions. This made me think
her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and
rather aristocratically dry as she sat there. But I must either have
lost the impression a moment later, or been goaded by it to further
aggression, for I remember asking her whether Mr. Ambient were in a good
vein of work, and when we might look for the appearance of the book on
which he was engaged. I have every reason now to know that she thought
me an odious person.

She gave a strange, small laugh as she said, "I am afraid you think I
know a great deal more about my husband's work than I do. I haven't
the least idea what he is doing," she added presently, in a slightly
different, that is a more explanatory, tone, as if she recognized
in some degree the enormity of her confession. "I don't read what he
writes!"

She did not succeed (and would not, even had she tried much harder) in
making it seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her,
and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you admire
_Beltraffio?_"

She hesitated a moment, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She
did not speak--I could see--the first words that rose to her lips; she
repeated what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh, of course he 's
very clever!" And with this she got up; her husband and little boy had
reappeared. Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and
had a few words with her husband, which I did not hear, and which ended
in her taking the child by the hand and returning to the house with him.
Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I th