Then he had to tell her all about how he had heard, about Mildred Quain, and so about the rest of the circle in Regent's Park. His shyness vanished; he gave humorous little sketches of his friends. Of course she knew Sarradet's shop, and was amused at this lifting of the veil which had hidden the Sarradet private life. But being the entirely natural creature she was, talking and thinking just as one of her class naturally would, she could not help treating the Sarradets as something out of her ordinary experience, as something rather funny—perhaps also instructive—to hear about, as social phenomena to be observed and studied. Without her own volition or consciousness her mind naturally assumed this attitude and expressed it in her questions and comments; neither were cruel, neither malicious, but both were absolutely from the outside—comments and questions about a foreign country addressed to a traveller who happened to have paid a visit there; for plainly she assumed, again instinctively, that Arthur Lisle was no more a native of that country than herself. Or he might almost have been an author presenting to an alert and sympathetic reader a realistic and vivacious picture of the life of a social class not his own, be it what is called higher or lower, or just quite different.
Whatever the gulf, the difference, might be—broad or narrow, justly felt or utterly exaggerated—Arthur Lisle would have been (at twenty-four) more than human not to be pleased to find himself, for Mrs. Norton Ward, on the same side of it as Mrs. Norton Ward. She was evidently quite genuine in this, as she seemed to be in everything. She was not flattering him or even putting him at his ease. She talked to him as "one of ourselves" simply because that seemed to her what he undoubtedly was—and what his friends undoubtedly, though of course quite blamelessly, were not.
They were thus in the full swing of talk—Arthur doing most of it—when the Judge came across the room and joined them. Arthur at once rose, to make way, and the lady too seemed to treat his audience as finished, although most graciously. But the Judge took hold of his arm and detained him.
"Do you know, Esther," he said, "that this young man has, by right of kinship, the entrée to the Shrine? And he doesn't use it!"
"What?" she cried with an appearance of lively interest. "Oh, are you related to the Godfreys, Mr. Lisle?"
Arthur blushed, but this time less acutely; he was getting, as the Judge might have put it, much inured to this matter of the Godfrey Lisles.
"Don't ask him questions about it; for some reason or another he doesn't like that."
"I don't really think my cousin Godfrey would care about——"
"Not the least the point, is it, Esther?" said the Judge with a twinkle.
"Not the least, Sir Christopher. But what's to be done if he won't go?"