"And precisely the reverse happened."

"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.

"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.

"That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man," Lindsay
contributed again.

"Tables turned, eh? Daresay it served him right," remarked Dr.
Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off?"

"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught
it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him!
Good-bye, you nice thing"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--"Good-bye,
Mr. Lindsay. Fancy--a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it
better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--goodbye."

With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room, and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in
a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a
trifle gross and material. Certainly as she sat there in her grace and
slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
present her in. With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness
of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
personal world of many effects