‘That is your feeling about her. You and Gaston would be safe not to admire the same woman.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot was mute. Although his face was too sunburnt to admit of visible deepening in hue, it may be that just then Geoffrey Arbuthnot blushed.
‘You have no change in your character. You could be content (a happy thing for your wife, whenever Mrs. Geoffrey appears on the scene) with one mood, one voice, one face, day after day, before you for forty years. Is not that true?’
‘I am not an artist,’ said Geff, after a pause. ‘For a humdrum man, prosaically occupied, the one face, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the one voice,’—ah, fool that he was! his own voice trembled—‘might constitute as much happiness as we are likely to taste, any of us, this side death.’
‘And Gaston is an artist in every fibre.’ Poor Dinah’s estimate of Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot was invariably Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s, except that she believed in him a vast deal more than he believed in himself. ‘I ought to know that my dull days, my silent evenings, are matters of course. It is not Gaston’s fault that he can only get inspiration through change. Some day, when the world is bowing down before a really great work of his, my hour of triumph will come. Who knows, Geff, if Gaston had married in his own class, if he and his wife had led just the usual life of people in society—it may be his genius would not have fared so well!’
Dinah never looked more perilously lovely than when, with flushed cheeks and kindling eyes, she spoke aloud of her ambitions for her husband. The poor girl’s whole life lay in her one, passionate, oft-bruised affection. More than common beauty, a look of divine, all-hoping, all-forgiving love, shone on her face at this instant.
Geff Arbuthnot recollected it wanted only ten seconds to midnight, and that he must fly. Had not long habit trained him to recognise the moment when flight was his surest, his only wisdom!
‘You and Gaston understand each other, as no third person can hope to do, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I consider you the two happiest mortals alive, though perhaps you do not know the extent of your own happiness.’
‘And you are off to your pillow, to dream of the heiress who has not snubbed you,’ said Dinah, as he moved from her side. ‘Why, Geff!’ For the first time she caught sight of the bouquet, somewhat cunningly held in shadow hitherto. ‘What roses, what jasmines, what heliotropes? I have been wondering all this time what made the room so sweet.’
And speaking thus, she stretched forth her hand for Marjorie Bartrand’s flowers.