are subtle if you can trace an amorous influence in that letter.”

“It doesn’t call for subtlety. Samson only abandons himself so completely under amorous circumstances. I hope you are not going to shear the poor fellow.”

“For shame,” said Camelia, while Perior, looking at her reflectively, softly slapped the palm of his hand with Arthur Henge’s letter. “I am his comrade. I help him; I am on his side, if you please, and against the Philistines.”

“Oh, are you? And this? Ah! this is from the leader of the Philistines, Rodrigg. Yes, I heard that Rodrigg was in the toils.” Perior examined the small, compact handwriting without much apparent curiosity.

“That is simply nonsense. There was a time—but he soon saw the hopelessness. He is my friend now; not that I am particularly fond of him—the grain is rather coarse: but he is a good creature, far more honest than he imagines, simple, after a clumsy fashion. He aims at distinguished diplomatic complexity, I may tell you, and, I fancy, comes to me for the necessary polishing. Read his letter.”

Perior had looked at her, still smiling, but more absently, while she spoke.

“Oh! Rodrigg is more cautious,” he said glancing through the great man’s neatly constructed phrases. “You are not with the Philistines; he feels that.”

“Politically no; but I have a good deal of influence with him. You see those reviews he mentions; I went through a lot of heavy French and Italian reading for him—sociology, industrialism—and saw the result in his last speech.”

“Really.”

“Ah, really. Don’t be sarcastic, Alceste, to me. One of those men will probably be Prime Minister some day. You can’t deny that they are eminent men.”

“And therefore you are an eminent woman. Well, the logic isn’t too lame. I’ll conclude, Camelia, that you may do quite a lot of harm in the world.”

“You don’t believe that a woman’s influence in politics can be for good?”

“Not the influence of a woman like you—a—a femme bibelot.”

“Good!” cried Camelia, gently clapping her hands.

“It is as that, you know, that these men court you. An objet d’art for their drawing-rooms.”

“You are mistaken, Alceste.”

“If I am mistaken—if they cherish ideals, they are unlucky devils.”

“No, Alceste, I am well justified in keeping my self-respect intact. It is not for my beaux yeux that I am courted—yes, yes—that wry look isn’t needed! I know in what hideously bad taste I am talking, but one can’t use artistic methods with you. As I say, I have my finger in any number of pies besides the pie political. You should see the respect in which I am held by the writers and painters. And I have good taste; I know that. You can’t deny it, since you helped it to grow. What other woman in London has a collection to equal mine? Dégas—Outamaro—Oh, Alceste, don’t look so funnily! Do you really imagine that I am not conscious of the baldness of my exposition? But what is the good of putting on a wig for you!”

“And all this to convince me——”

“Yes, to convince you.”

“Of what, pray?”

“That I am not a little insignificance to be passed by with indulgence.”

“Should you prefer severity?” and Perior, conscious that she had succeeded in “drawing” him, could not repress “You are an outrageous little egotist, Camelia.”

Camelia, her hands clasped over her knee, contemplated him with more gravity than he had expected.

“No,” she demurred, “selfish, but not egotistic. There is a difference, isn’t there? Egotism is subjective, selfishness objective. I wonder,” she added, “what you do think of me. Not that I care—much! Am I not frank? I must care, since I am shuffling about before you; getting a cuffing for my pains!” She rose suddenly, laughing, not in the least bitterly, and walked to the window.

“Mamma and Mary,” she announced. “Did Frances evade them? They disconcert her. Frances, you know, goes in for knowingness—cleverness—the modern vice. Don’t you hate clever people? Frances doesn’t dare talk epigrams to me; I can’t stand it. You saw a lot of Mamma and Mary last winter, didn’t you? Took Mary out riding. Now, come here, Mr. Perior, and tell me how she looked on horseback.”

Camelia was smiling irrepressibly as he joined her, and they watched the approach of the two ladies across the lawn. Certainly the angular, thick-set form of the younger gave no hint of pleasing possibilities under circumstances so trying as the equestrian.

“I never could wheedle Mary into the saddle. I should like to see her on horseback immensely.” Camelia’s eyes twinkled: “A sort of cowering desperation, wasn’t it?”

“No, she rode rather nicely,” said Perior concisely. There was something rather brutal in Camelia’s comments as she stood there with such rhythmic loveliness of pose and contour.

“I wish Mary did not look so much like a milk pudding,” she went on; “a raisinless milk pudding—so sane, so formless, so uneventful.”

Perior did not smile.

CHAPTER IV

LADY PATON was a thin, graceful woman, her slenderness emphasized, like her daughter’s, by a very small head. Since her husband’s death she had worn black, and even now it seemed to invade her delicate whiteness rather overwhelmingly, rising closely about her throat, falling over her fragile hands, enfolding her with a soft solemnity. Her white hair was smoothed thickly under the transparent cambrics of an exquisite cap, and framed the sweetness of a faded face, in profile like Camelia’s. Camelia’s eyes were her father’s, and her smile; Lady Paton’s eyes were round like a child’s, and her smile half-frightened, half-explanatory. With all the gentlewoman’s mild dignity, her look was timid, as though it besought indulgence for a lifelong sense of insignificance, a look that aroused in Perior his grimmest scorn for a world in which such flower-like moral loveliness is inevitably victimized by garish egotisms. He had known Sir Charles, a charming companion, a good fellow—in the somewhat widely licensed sense the term implies, but not fit to untie his wife’s shoe-strings when it came to a comparison. Camelia now had stepped upon her father’s undeserved pedestal, and Perior, watching the new epoch of incense-burning, had smiled more and more grimly. He was devoted to Lady Paton, and had been so since the days when a raw, sensitive, high-strung youth, fresh from college, her Madonna head had roused in him poetical idealizations, and her husband’s gay indifference a chafing resentment. With years he had grown rather fond of Sir Charles, could make allowances for him, and, too, had no longer idealized Lady Paton; but though he now saw her, sweet but dull, lovely in unselfishness, yet weak in all except a submission noble in its own way, the fragrant charm still stirred him with an almost paternal tenderness, a pity, even a reverence. She was too obtuse to see her own cramped and imprisoned life, but he saw it, and her unconsciousness was part of the pathos. He was very fond of her, and she of him, so that with all his protective partisanship there was, too, a willing filial deference.

This little corner of appreciation and affection was the softest spot in Perior’s character. He took both her hands now and said, looking at her with a whimsical gentleness, “So you are back at last! And glad to be back, too, are you not?”

“Oh, very. And Camelia seems to like it so much,” she smiled round at her daughter; “she was beginning to look quite fagged; already the country has done her good.”

Camelia smiled back with a humoring lightness.

Mary Fairleigh stood quietly behind