generalised. But then--he had put his foot in the stirrup--his hobby
bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of
the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the
artist. The artist does his work--the beholder must do his. They are
collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be
like each other--with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art,
in short, is entirely a matter of reciprocity. The kind of beauty that
jumps at you is the kind you end by getting heartily tired of--is the
skin-deep kind; and therefore it is n't really beauty at all--it is only
an approximation to beauty--it may be only a simulacrum of it."

Her eyes were smiling, her face was glowing, softly, with interest,
with friendliness and perhaps with the least suspicion of something
else--perhaps with the faintest glimmer of suppressed amusement; but
interest was easily predominant.

"Yes," she assented.... But then she pursued her own train of ideas.
"And--with you--I particularly like the woman--Pauline. I can't tell
you how much I like her. I--it sounds extravagant, but it's true--I can
think of no other woman in the whole of fiction whom I like so
well--who makes so curiously personal an appeal to me. Her wit--her
waywardness--her tenderness--her generosity--everything. How did your
friend come by his conception of her? She's as real to me as any woman
I have ever known she's more real to me than most of the women I
know--she's absolutely real, she lives, she breathes. Yet I have never
known a woman resembling her. Life would be a merrier business if one
did know women resembling her. She seems to me all that a woman ought
ideally to be. Does your friend know women like that--the lucky man? Or
is Pauline, for all her convincingness, a pure creature of imagination?"

"Ah," said Peter, laughing, "you touch the secret springs of my friend's
inspiration. That is a story in itself. Felix Wildmay is a perfectly
commonplace Englishman. How could a woman like Pauline be the creature
of his imagination? No--she was a 'thing seen.' God made her. Wildmay
was a mere copyist. He drew her, tant bien que mal, from the life from
a woman who's actually alive on this dull globe to-day. But that's the
story."

The Duchessa's eyes were intent.

"The story-? Tell me the story," she pronounced in a breath, with
imperious eagerness.

And her eyes waited, intently.

"Oh," said Peter, "it's one of thos