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“Ah, voilà!” Mrs. Dyott softly sounded.

“Oh, but it isone; you can make it out,” Voyt promptly declared. “They do what they feel, and they feel more things than we. They strike so many more notes, and with so different a hand. When it comes to any account of a relation, say, between a man and a woman —I mean an intimate or a curious or a suggestive one—where are we compared to them? They don’t exhaust the subject, no doubt,” he admitted; “but we don’t touch it, don’t even skim it. It’s as if we denied its existence, its possibility. You’ll doubtless tell me, however, he went on, “that as all such relations arefor us, at the most, much simpler, we can only have all round less to say about them. ”

She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. “I beg your pardon. I don’t think I shall tell you anything of the sort. I don’t know that I even agree with your premise. ”

“About such relations?” He looked agreeably surprised. “You think we make them larger?—or subtler?”

Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, at the fire, but at the ceiling. “I don’t know what I think. ”

“It’s not that she doesn’t know,” Mrs. Dyott remarked. “It’s only that she doesn’t say. ”

But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a moment he watched Maud. “It sticks out of you, you know, that you’ve yourself written something. Haven’t you—and published? I’ve a notion I could read you. ”

“When I do publish,” she said without moving, “you’ll be the last one I shall tell. I have,” she went on, “a lovely subject, but it would take an amount of treatment—!”

“Tell us then at least what it is. ”

At this she again met his eyes. “Oh, to tell it would be to express it, and that’s just what I can’t do. What I meant to say just now,” she added, “was that the French, to my sense, give us only again and again, forever and ever, the same couple. There they are once more, as one has had them to satiety, in that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly again find them in the blue. ”

“Then why do you keep reading about them?” Mrs. Dyott demanded.

Maud hesitated. “I don’t!” she sighed. “At all events, I shan’t any more. I give it up. ”

“You’ve been looking for something, I judge,” said Colonel Voyt, “that you’re not likely to find. It doesn’t exist. ”

“What is it?” Mrs. Dyott inquired.

“I never look,” Maud remarked, “for anything but an interest. ”

“Naturally. But your interest,” Voyt replied, “is in something different from life. ”

“Ah, not a bit! I lovelife—in art, though I hate it anywhere else. It’s the poverty of the life those people show, and the awful bounders, of both sexes, that they represent. ”

“Oh, now we have you!” her interlocutor laughed. “To me, when all’s said and done, they seem to be—as near as art can come—in the truth of the truth. It can only take what life gives it, though it certainly may be a pity that that isn’t better. Your complaint of their monotony is a complaint of their conditions. When you say we get always the same couple what do you mean but that we get always the same passion? Of course we do!” Voyt declared. “If what you’re looking for is another, that’s what you won’t anywhere find. ”

Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott seemed to wait. “Well, I suppose I’m looking, more than anything else, for a decent woman. ”

“Oh, then, you mustn’t look for her in pictures of passion. That’s not her element nor her whereabouts. ”