ring the last few weeks.
He had begun to grow rather captivated by Miss Chivvey and in his
efforts to polish, refine and educate her had become rather carried away
himself. But towards the end she began to show signs of rebellion; she
was bored, though impressed. He took her to a serious play and explained
it all the time, during which she openly yawned. Finally, when she
insisted on his seeing a statuette made of her by her artistic friend,
an ignorant, pretentious little creature, known as Mimsie, they
positively had a quarrel.

"Well, I don't care what you say; I think it's very pretty," when Rupert
pointed out faults that a child could easily have seen.

"So it may be, my dear child--not that I think it is. But it's
absolutely without merit; it's very very bad. It could hardly be worse.
If she went all over London I doubt if she could find a more ridiculous
thing calling itself a work of art. Can't you see it's like those little
figures they used to have on old-fashioned Twelfth Cakes, made of
sugar."

"No, I can't. Shut up! I mayn't know quite so much as you, but ever
since I was a child everybody's always said I was very artistic."

They were sitting in her mother's drawing-room in Camden Hill. Rupert
glanced round it: it was a deplorable example of misdirected aims and
mistaken ambitions; a few yards of beaded curtains which separated it
from another room gratified Moona with the satisfactory sensation that
her surroundings were Oriental. As a matter of fact, the decoration was
so commonplace and vulgar that to attempt to describe it would be
painful to the writer whilst having no sort of effect on the reader,
since it was almost indescribable. From the decorative point of view,
the room was the most unmeaning of failures, the most complete of
disasters.

Rupert had hoped, nevertheless, to cultivate her taste, and educate her
generally. He was most anxious of all to explain to her that, so far
from being artistic, she was the most pretentious of little Philistines.
Why, indeed, should she be anything else? It was the most irritating
absurdity that she should think she was, or wish to be.

Rupert was growing weary of this, and beginning to think his object was
hopeless.

A certain amount of excitement that she had created in him by her
brusque rudeness, her high spirits, even the jarring of her loud laugh,
was beginning to lose its effect; or rather the effect was changed.
Instead of attracting, it irrita