Isabel was silent.
"You are right in thinking that love for the beautiful is to be found in strange places," said Edgar; "last month a lot of children were sent down from Hampden House into the country for a week; and one of the poorest and most ragged of them said afterwards to one of our Sisters: 'Oh! Sister, it was all so beautiful that it made me cry for you'. That simply meant, as you say, that the sight of natural beauty stimulated that child's highest feelings, and made her long for the person for whom she cared the most."
Isabel fully entered into the feelings of the little ragged girl; she had felt exactly the same herself at the State Concert.
"If the child hadn't loved the Sister first, the beauty of the country would not have had power to touch her," she said, "love is the Open Sesame that lets in beauty, and gives us eyes to see."
"I should put it just the other way," said Madderley; "and say that beauty is the cause of love."
"It seems to me that there is something deeper even than that," argued Paul, "some innate fineness, proper to human nature itself, which makes all these things possible to it."
"It is often surprising," remarked his wife, "how people are nearly always nice when one gets to know them, and pierces through the outer husk of artificiality which they wear before the world. I detest heaps of people that I have only met at dinner; but I think I like everybody that I have ever had breakfast with."
The others laughed.
"Which simply means that the better one knows one's fellow-creatures the better one thinks of them," added Paul.
"I cannot offer an opinion," said Madderley, "I have never been down to breakfast."