“Do you think art is everything?” she inquired in, a moment.
“In art, of course I do!”
“And do you think beauty is everything?”
“I don’t know about its being everything. But it’s very delightful”
“Of course it is difficult for a woman to know how far to go,” said my companion. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I am intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued, in a tone of stifled yearning which seemed to indicate that she had not yet arrived at her desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she inquired, with a cadence apparently intended for an assurance that my answer would settle this recondite question for her. It was difficult for me to make it very original, and I am afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, appending to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness, and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she did not mean to go to church, as that was an obvious way of being good. She replied that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, on Sunday afternoon, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly, without transition, she said to me, “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino being better. I have seen him, and he’s not at all right.”
“Surely his mother would know, would n’t she?” I suggested.
She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches. “As regards most matters, one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-law would do. But as regards this one, there are strange elements at work.”
“Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”
“No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”
“Elements of affection, of course; elements of anxiety. Why do you call them strange?”