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Loud applause; rows of indulgent, admiring, cultured smiles—like the Cambridge ladies when the giver of the Clark lectures makes a joke.

“Guy! I have told you before, I will not have you cracking the fuchsia buds.”

It was the Doña, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La Bruyère’s amateur of tulips.

“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.

“Hullo, Guy! Been writing any more poetry?”

This was Dick’s invariable greeting of him.

Then he wandered off towards the house—a trifle crestfallen. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature.” Yes; but wasn’t that begging the question, the direct question he had asked whether she liked his poetry? And one could be “an amazingly brilliant creature,” and, at the same time, but an indifferent writer. Marie Bashkirsteff, for instance, whose journal he had come upon in an attic at home, mouldering away between a yellow-backed John Strange Winter and a Who’s Who of the nineties; no one could deny that socially she must have been extremely brilliant, but, to him, it had seemed incredible that the world should have failed to perceive that her “self-revelations” were to a large extent faked, and her imagination a tenth-rate one. And now, both as painter and writer, Time had shown her up, together with the other pompiers whose work had made such a brave show in the Salons of the eighties, or had received such panegyrics in the Mercure de France.