zaar rode on
long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the
encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they might
have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and
acknowledged no demand for more than the smile.

The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of her
head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her elbow on
the table. They had found a portrait-painter.

"He has such an eye," said Alicia, "for the possibilities of character."

"Such an eye that he develops them. I know one man he painted. I
suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime
he and everybody else had forgotten about it. All but Salter. Salter
re-created it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a
lodging behind the man's wrinkles. I saw the picture. It was
fantastic--psychologically."

"Psychology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know," Alicia said.
"Do let him give you a little more. It's only Moselle." She felt quite
direct, and simple, too, in uttering her postulate. Her eyes had a
friendly, unembarrassed look; there was nothing behind them but the joy
of talking intelligently about Salter.

Hilda did not even glance away. She looked at her hostess instead, with
an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have
mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she could swim in
any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in
Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent
quality.

"It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially, thank
Heaven, to my trade." Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the
way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms. That was the
case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.

"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a
picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to
do it, or a pen or a chisel!"

"I know what you mean," said Alicia. She had a little flush, and an
excited hand among the wine-glasses. "No, I don't want any; please don't
bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in aspic. "It's much
more direct--your way."

"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh, yes! if we are lightly
esteemed