"No; frankly, I can't say that it does," Mrs. Frostwinch responded.
She leaned back in her chair, a soft flush on her thin, high-bred face. Her figure, in a beautiful gown of beryl plush embroidered with gold, seemed artistically designed for the carved, high-backed chair in which she sat, and both her companions were too appreciative to lose the grace of the picture she made.
"I cannot see that it is bad," she went on. "Mr. Fenton has proved it to me, and even Mr. Herman, who seems, so far as I have seen him, the most charitable of men, when I asked him how he liked it, spoke with positive loathing of it. I can't manage to make myself unhappy over it, that's all. And I believe I am as appreciative as the average."
To Helen there was something at once fascinating and repellent in this talk. She was attracted by Mrs. Frostwinch. The perfect breeding, the grace, the polish of the woman, won upon her strongly, while yet the subtile air of taking life conventionally, of lacking vital earnestness, was utterly at variance with the sculptor's temperament and methods of thought. She no sooner recognized this feeling than she rebuked herself for shallowness and a want of charity, yet even so the impression remained. To the artistic temperament, enthusiasm is the only excuse for existence.
"I think Mrs. Fenton is right," she said. "The few form the correct judgment, and the many adopt it in the end because it is based on truth. It seems to me," she continued, thoughtfully, "that the prime condition of effectiveness is constancy, and only that opinion can be constant that has truth for a foundation, because no other basis would remain to hold it up."
"That may be true," was the reply, "if you take matters in a sufficiently long range, but you seem to me to be viewing things from the standpoint of eternity."
The smile with which she said these last words was so charming that
Helen warmed toward her, and she smiled also in replying,—
"Isn't that, after all, the only safe way to look at things?"
"What deep waters we are getting into," Edith commented. "And yet they say women are always frivolous."
"The Boston luncheon," returned Mrs. Frost-winch, "is a solemn assembly for the discussion of mighty themes. Yesterday, at Mrs. Bodewin Ranger's, we disposed of all the knotty problems relating to the lower classes."