FullReads

If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction. It may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there–a desire to prove himself not after all so mismated. Dolcino continued to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me as a place to offer genius every favour and sanction–not to bristle with challenges and checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.

“Well, of most things,” I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn’t talked of Miss Ambient.

“And don’t you think some of his theories are very peculiar?”

“Oh I guess I agree with them all.” I was very particular, for Miss Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.

“Do you think art’s everything?” she put to me in a moment.

“In art, of course I do!”

“And do you think beauty’s everything?”

“Everything’s a big word, which I think we should use as little as possible. But how can we not want beauty?”

“Ah there you are!” she sighed, though I didn’t quite know what she meant by it. “Of course it’s difficult for a woman to judge how far to go,” she went on. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I’m intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back–don’t you see what I mean?–I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been baffled of this modest desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she pursued with a dubious quaver–an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I’m afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn’t mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino’s being better. I’ve seen him and he’s not at all right.”