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“Precisely!” Mrs. Dyott was full of approval.

Maud, however, was full of vagueness. “What great fact?”

“The fact of a relation. The adventure’s a relation; the relation’s an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax, and for the most part the decline, of one. And what is the honest lady doing on that side of the town?”

Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. “She doesn’t so much as forma relation. ”

But Maud bore up. “Doesn’t it depend, again, on what you call a relation?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Dyott, “if a gentleman picks up her pocket-handkerchief—”

“Ah, even that’s one,” their friend laughed, “if she has thrown it to him. We can only deal with one that isone. ”

“Surely,” Maud replied. “But if it’s an innocent one—?”

“Doesn’t it depend a good deal,” Mrs. Dyott asked, “on what you call innocent?”

“You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction? Yes,” Voyt replied; “that’s exactly what the bored reader complains of. He has asked for bread and been given a stone. What is it but, with absolute directness, a question of interest, or, as people say, of the story? What’s a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where’s the story? If it doesn’t stop, where’s the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that’s how we flounder. Art is our flounderings shown. ”

Mrs. Blessingbourne—and with an air of deference scarce supported perhaps by its sketchiness—kept her deep eyes on this definition. “But sometimes we flounder out. ”

It immediately touched in Colonel Voyt the spring of a genial derision. “That’s just where I expected youwould! One always sees it come. ”

“He has, you notice,” Mrs. Dyott parenthesised to Maud, “seen it come so often; and he has always waited for it and met it. ”

“Met it, dear lady, simply enough! It’s the old story, Mrs. Blessingbourne. The relation is innocent that the heroine gets out of. The book is innocent that’s the story of her getting out. But what the devil—in the name of innocence—was she doing in?”

Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. “You have to be in, you know, to getout. So there you are already with your relation. It’s the end of your goodness. ”

“And the beginning,” said Voyt, “of your play!”

“Aren’t they all, for that matter, even the worst,” Mrs. Dyott pursued, “supposed sometime or other to get out? But if, meanwhile, they’ve been in, however briefly, long enough to adorn a tale—”

“They’ve been in long enough to point a moral. That is to point ours!” With which, and as if a sudden flush of warmer light had moved him, Colonel Voyt got up. The veil of the storm had parted over a great red sunset.

Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood before his charming antagonist who, with eyes lowered and a somewhat fixed smile, had not moved. “We’ve spoiled her subject!” the elder lady sighed.

“Well,” said Voyt, “it’s better to spoil an artist’s subject than to spoil his reputation. I mean,” he explained to Maud with his indulgent manner, “his appearance of knowing what he has got hold of, for that, in the last resort, is his happiness. ”

She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect as handsomely mild as his own. “You can’t spoil my happiness. ”

He held her hand an instant as he took leave. “I wish I could add to it!”

III

When he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had candidly asked if her friend had found him rude or crude, Maud replied—though not immediately—that she had feared showing only too much that she found him charming. But if Mrs. Dyott took this, it was to weigh the sense. “How could you show it too much?”