"Here Lady Sargent overheard us. You should have seen her face of disgust! Poor dear, how promptly her castle of Eros was blown to smithereens!"
III.
Two days later we were talking of the divine afflatus, and the relation of great work to character, when Lorraine demanded my opinion as to the analogy between thought and conversation.
"Speech was given us to hide our thoughts," I said, quoting Tallyrand without in the least agreeing with him.
"I fancied you would say that," he replied, and opened his note-book to refer to some jottings which had evidently been recently made, and which supplied, strangely enough, another impromptu and bizarre patch to the unconventional whole so recklessly commenced by my sister Sarah.
I append the jottings shown me by their writer as a problem for unravelment. They began:—
"Charming because she is perplexing, or perplexing because she is charming? It is impossible to say. At anyrate, the external pencillings are pretty. Her manner at times betrays pre-disposition to enmity, for the flippant pose is merely a disguise. Is it enmity, or is it reserve? One must take into account the larger reticence of larger natures in serious matters. A woman who can be good reading to the clown must fail to attract the scholar. Yet me she keeps on the bare threshold of comprehension. Is it because there is a barn at the back, or a palace? Most people open up their drawing-rooms at once, and parade their bric-a-brac. Is she given to this want of hospitality in speech, this loitering in the open air, or am I alone treated as a burglar—an intruder, who longs to drag the arras from her sanctum door?"
The next page rambled on in this fashion:—
"There is an initial stage of some characters which is purely parabolic, though every phase of the stage has its analogy in the actual. The difficulty is the tracing of corroborations. With so much promise one looks for some fulfilment, but she contrives to make out of the very postponement of promise a larger reiteration of it. She permits no shadow of negation that might disappoint, no growth of hope that might encourage. Her talk is so well conventionalised to suit the tonic and dominant of social exigence that one must avoid the vulgarian error of striving after a literal transcription of it."
A day later had been scrawled, with a dash of irritation in the caligraphy, a third note:—