Quita's verdict on her visitor moved him to a smile of half-cynical amusement. He enjoyed her occasional unabashed lapses into the eternal feminine.
"I'm with you there," he answered, heartily. "The worst fault a human being can commit is to be faultless. Poor Mrs Desmond! She will have to subsist without our admiration."
"No need to waste pity on her, mon ami. I am convinced that she gets far more admiration than is good for her as it is. She has only been married a little over two years, I believe, and it is safe to presume that her husband idolises her shadow. She is the sort of woman men put on a pedestal, and worship kneeling; and women mostly detest, because, in their secret hearts, they would like to be up there too! Personally I have no use for pedestals. I am content to be bon camarade! As for that sublime Desmond woman, I feel morally certain that she never commits an indiscretion, or has a knot in her shoe-lace, or loses her scissors!"
"Are you peculiarly lenient towards those three failings?"
"I am quite culpably lenient towards the whole tribe of human failings. They are the salt of life. I have never really understood that incessant harping on the mystery of pain and sin. The question, Why should they be allowed to exist? seems to me simply fatuous. No world worth living in could have been created without them. They are the backbone of all drama; and I love drama inordinately. They put the iron into men's souls, and the grit into their characters. Think what a nauseating crew of sentimentalists we should be,
'If all had love, as every nest hath eggs,
And every head of maize her feathery cap.'
I, for one, should beg to be excused from spending three-score years and ten on a planet full of sugar-plums and kisses!"
She left her perch on the railings, and stood erect, in an unconscious attitude of defiance; and Garth watched her speculatively through narrowed lids. He was wondering whether Mrs Desmond's remark that she had persuaded Captain Lenox to go shooting beyond Chumba, instead of deserting Dalhousie for the interior, might not be accountable for this unusual burst of eloquence.
"I had no notion that you went in for studying big questions of that kind," he remarked, with an amused air of interest.
"Studying them! But no! What call is there to study them? I have my ears and eyes, and my priceless intuitions. It is enough. An artist will learn more about life and character with the help of those three, than all the savants in creation could imbibe from a hecatomb of books. Michel—where are you? What has been keeping you so quiet since Mrs Desmond's departure?"