drove of afternoons
with Joanna in the dog-cart, no dyspeptic bishop could have assumed his
air of grim urbanity. But after a while I realised that the old Paragot
still smouldered within him; and now and then it burst into unregenerate
flame.

Mrs. Rushworth had inherited from her father an old Georgian Bath-stone
house at the end of the High Street of Melford. He had been the Duke of
Wiltshire's agent and a person of note in the town. Mrs. Rushworth also
was a person of note, and her beautiful daughter, the Countess, a lady
of fortune, became a person of greater note still. Now on Tuesday
afternoons Mrs. Rushworth was "at home." We saw a vast deal of Society,
ladies of county families, parsons' wives, doctors' wives and the female
belongings of the gentlemen farmers round about. There were also a stray
hunting man, a curate or two and Major Walters. The callers sat about
the drawing room in little groups drinking tea and discoursing on
unimportant and unintelligible matters, and seemed oddly shy of Paragot
and myself, whom Joanna always introduced most graciously. They
preferred to talk among themselves. I considered them impolite, which no
doubt they were; but I have since reflected that Paragot was an unusual
guest at an English country tea-party, and if there is one thing more
than another that an English country tea-party resents, it is the
unusual. I am sure that a square muffin would be considered an
indelicacy. On the second of these Tuesday gatherings which I was
privileged to attend, Joanna presented me to two well-favoured young
women, the daughters, I gathered, of people who had country places near
by.

"Mr. Pradel is the artist from Paris who is painting mamma's portrait,"
she explained.

I bowed and remarked that I was enchanted to make their acquaintance.
They stared. I know now that this Gallic mode of address is not usual in
Melford. One young woman, recovering from the shock, said she would like
to be an artist. The other asked me whether I had been to the Academy. I
said, no. I lived in Paris. Then had I been to the Salon?

"At Janot's," said I, with the idiot egregiousness of youth, "we don't
go to the Salon."

"Why?" asked the first, looking across the room, apparently at a curate.

"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which
might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to
preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."