w can
you hate it?' she inquired. 'It means so much that is intellectual, so
much that is beautiful.'

'I suppose so,' said Miss Buchanan. 'I do like to look at it sometimes;
the spaces and colour are so nice.'

'The spaces, and what's in them, surely. What is it that you don't like?
The French haven't our standards of morality, of course, but don't you
think it's rather narrow to judge them by our standards?'

Althea was pleased to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of
standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her naive.
But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at
all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the
women's faces--the well-dressed women. 'I don't mind the poor ones so
much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and
frightfully tired. It is the well-dressed ones I can't put up with. And
the men are even more horrid. I always want to spend a week in walking
over the moors when I've been here. It leaves a hot taste in my mouth,
like some horrid liqueur.'

'But the beauty--the intelligence,' Althea urged. 'Surely you are a
little intolerant, to see only people's faces in Paris. Think of the
Salon Carree and the Cluny; they take away the taste of the liqueur.
How can one have enough of them?'

Miss Buchanan again demurred. 'Oh, I think I can have enough of them.'

'But you care for pictures, for beautiful things,' said Althea, half
vexed and half disturbed. But Miss Buchanan said that she liked having
them about her, not having to go and look at them. 'It is so stuffy in
museums, too; they always give me a headache. However, I don't believe I
really do care about pictures. You see, altogether I've had no
education.'

Her education, indeed, contrasted with Althea's well-ordered and
elaborate progression, had been lamentable--a mere succession of
incompetent governesses. Yet, on pressing her researches, Althea, though
finding almost unbelievable voids, felt, more than anything else, tastes
sharp and fine that seemed to cut into her own tastes and show her
suddenly that she did not really like what she had thought she liked, or
that she liked what she had hardly before been aware of. All that Helen
could be brought to define was that she liked looking at things in the
country: at birds, clouds, and flowers; but though striking Althea as a
creature strangely untouched and unmoulded, she struck her yet more
strongly as bea