not
had too much conscience she would have had too little eagerness. It was
the last thing she would have endured or condoned--the particular thing
she would not have forgiven. Did she sit in torment while her husband
turned his somersaults, or was she now too so perverse that she thought
it a fine thing to be striking at the expense of one's honour? It would
have taken a wondrous alchemy--working backwards, as it were--to produce
this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered
tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband's
humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness--a proof
of life and talent), there was still the possibility that she had not
found him out, that she took his false pieces at his own valuation. A
little reflection rendered this hypothesis untenable; it was too evident
that the account he gave of things must repeatedly have contradicted her
own knowledge. Within an hour or two of his meeting them Lyon had seen
her confronted with that perfectly gratuitous invention about the profit
they had made off his early picture. Even then indeed she had not, so
far as he could see, smarted, and--but for the present he could only
contemplate the case.

Even if it had not been interfused, through his uneradicated tenderness
for Mrs. Capadose, with an element of suspense, the question would still
have presented itself to him as a very curious problem, for he had not
painted portraits during so many years without becoming something of a
psychologist. His inquiry was limited for the moment to the opportunity
that the following three days might yield, as the Colonel and his wife
were going on to another house. It fixed itself largely of course upon
the Colonel too--this gentleman was such a rare anomaly. Moreover it had
to go on very quickly. Lyon was too scrupulous to ask other people what
they thought of the business--he was too afraid of exposing the woman he
once had loved. It was probable also that light would come to him from
the talk of the rest of the company: the Colonel's queer habit, both as
it affected his own situation and as it affected his wife, would be a
familiar theme in any house in which he was in the habit of staying.
Lyon had not observed in the circles in which he visited any marked
abstention from comment on the singularities of their members. It
interfered with his progress that the Colonel hunted all day, while he
plied his brushes