“It begins so beautifully,” Mrs. Lee continued. “Listen: ‘Here where all hearts are tender and sincere.’”
“‘Here where all hearts are tender and sincere,’” Mrs. Witherby echoed, rolling her eyes. “How lovely! One would know at once that meant Roseborough.”
The phrase had caught Andrews’s ear. In playing, he parroted vacantly:
“‘Here where all hearts are tender and sincere!’ Very nice. Trumps.”
Mrs. Witherby returned to the item of greatest interest to her.
“But, dear Mrs. Lee, you spoke just now of his being handsomely paid for something. What was he paid for, and how much was it?”
“Oh, yes. For designing a great pleasure garden for the peasants of that place. But I don’t know the amount.”
“Oh, he is a landscape gardener now?” Andrews asked. He was an amateur horticulturist, in a very small way, himself, and enjoyed gardening details. The judge, whose interest in Mr. Falcon was exhausted, had returned to his paper. Mrs. Lee laughed.
“No. Not a gardener. He is a writer. But one who can write on the earth, if pencil and pad fail him. A practical poet—if you can call ‘practical’ a man who roams the world in search of beauty, or of conditions which will allow him to make them beautiful. The professor delighted in saying—oh, figuratively, of course—that one could easily recognize the true artist, because his fingers are always knuckle-deep in earth-dust; whereas the dilettante’s fingers are chiefly remarkable for nail-polish.”
“And, there, I entirely agree with him! As I am constantly telling Corinne, I consider the way people polish their nails, nowadays, is positively vulgar.” Mrs. Witherby spoke emphatically and played her card with a righteous flourish.