"You are making too much of a curve. That stalk does not bend in reality," said Tom, who looked upon the said stalk from a different standpoint, and failed to allow for the fact. He know about as much in respect of painting as the Rectory cat. A row of "flower-heads," with stalks as stiff as pokers in parallel lines below, would have seemed to him the correct thing.
"Nature deals in curves. When she doesn't, it is a mistake, and art has to put her right," declared Ethel sententiously; for when dealing with a sententious man, one has sometimes to pay him in his own coin.
Tom undertook to prove her mistaken, and Ethel listened with wandering thoughts to his laboured disquisition. It was hard to attend enough to prevent his discovering her absence. Her heart was at the Grange, for the last fortnight had been a severe trial of her fortitude, and each day added to the trial.
She had not seen or spoken with Nigel since his father's death; and one or two brief interviews with Daisy had been unsatisfactory. Ethel was not intimate with the Browning family as a whole, only with Nigel as Malcolm's friend—not to speak of his being her own friend!—and in a less degree with Daisy. She had always a distinct consciousness of being avoided by Fulvia. Her own feelings would have carried her daily to the Grange, if only as an expression of her intense sympathy with them all, if only to learn how Nigel was: but this could not be; and certainly neither Mrs. Browning nor Fulvia would have welcomed any such expression of solicitude from a member of the Elvey family, albeit they were most polite to Mr. Elvey, who had paid more than one visit to the widow. Ethel had to stay at home, and to wait for such information as came by her father and Malcolm, or filtered through less direct channels. She seized any scrap of news with avidity, yet her hunger was not satisfied.
"Now, these are instances of straight lines in Nature, which I venture to think you will hardly disparage," said Tom.
Ethel woke up to the fact that "these instances" had been thrown away upon her. She had travelled to the Grange while he discoursed, forgetting even to paint, and sitting, with suspended brush, in an attitude of absorption, which Tom took for devoted attention to himself. He was much gratified naturally!
"Oh yes,—Oh no, I mean," she said hastily. Alarmed lest he should catechise her on what he had said, she began to paint again in vehement style, and Tom's attention strayed back to the "flower-head" expanding under her touch.
"I have not yet introduced you to the Umbelliferous Family," he observed, by way of a ponderous joke. "This is not a bad opportunity, while you are actually engaged in taking the likeness of a member of that family—Ha! Ha!" Tom stopped to laugh complacently, and Ethel felt like throwing her brush at him. "You are fairly acquainted already with the family characteristics of the Ranunculaceæ, the Papaveraceæ, the Onagraceæ, the Myrtaceæ, the Violaceæ, the Cucurbitaceæ, the Malvaceæ, the—"
"Seven sneezes," murmured Ethel. It really did seem as if Tom were laboriously selecting all those tribes which rejoiced in this particular sound at the end of their names.
"I beg your pardon. Did you speak?" asked unsuspecting Tom.