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“She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position–thanks to Miss Ambient–to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he didn’t; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: “Ah nothing shall ever hurt HIM!”

He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I’m afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag. “She thinks me immoral–that’s the long and short of it,” he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive eyes–the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman–viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. “It’s very strange when one thinks it all over, and there’s a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She’s a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel–she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn’t do it badly as exposition–is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It’s a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It’s two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he repeated, pushing open the gate. “And they’re irreconcilable!” he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: “If you’re going into this kind of thing there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of literature–I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams–those they’ll swallow by the bucket!” I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. “Ah it doesn’t matter after all,” he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful; strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles) the very angel of the pink of propriety–putting the pink for a principle, though I’d rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what. He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant–that he might well have owed her a brief poetic inspiration. It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled, more delicately tinted and petalled.