added.

He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his
eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if
it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against
him, was good to his palm. "Mrs. Worthingham's things? You think them
beautiful?"

Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. "Why certainly prodigious,
or whatever. Isn't that conceded?"

"No doubt every horror, at the pass we've come to, is conceded. That's
just what I complain of."

"Do you _complain?_"--she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn't have
imagined such a thing.

"To me her things are awful. They're the newest of the new."

"Ah, but the old forms!"

"Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions."

"Oh but," she pleaded, "we can't all be _really_ old."

"No, we can't, Cornelia. But _you_ can--!" said White-Mason with the
frankest appreciation.

She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her
looking up at the curate at Bognor. "Thank you, sir! If that's all you
want----!"

"It _is_" he said, "all I want--or almost."

"Then no wonder such a creature as that," she lightly moralised, "won't
suit you!"

He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest
stare. "You hold she certainly won't suit me?"

"Why, what can I tell about it? Haven't you by this time found out?"

"No, but I think I'm finding." With which he began again to explore.

Miss Rasch immensely wondered. "You mean you don't expect to come to an
understanding with her?" And then as even to this straight challenge he
made at first no answer: "Do you mean you give it up?"

He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes--only looking
again about the room. "What do you think of my chance?"

"Oh," his companion cried, "what has what I think to do with it? How can
I think anything but that she must like you?"

"Yes--of course. But how much?"

"Then don't you really know?" Cornelia asked.

He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. "Do
you, my dear?"

She waited a little. "If you haven't really put it to her I don't
suppose she knows."

This at last arrested him again. "My dear Cornelia, she doesn't
know----!"

He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis
of it, so that she took him up. "The more reason then to help her to
find it out."

"I mean," he explained, "that she doesn't know