"It was there all right enough, lying dormant, you know. I felt it. Mrs. Fazakerly felt it—that's why she married the Colonel. You felt it."
"I didn't."
"Excuse me, you did. That's why you stayed three weeks at Coton Manor when you needn't have stopped three days. As for Mr. Manby there, he simply worships the ground she treads on, as they say."
"The devil he does! What's he doing here?"
"As you see, he's painting pictures as hard as ever he can go. He paints them in order to live; but as he has to live in order to paint, Frida—well, between you and me, Frida keeps him and Eileen and Ermyntrude, the whole family, in short. But that's a detail. It isn't offered as any explanation of the charm. I don't believe that anybody ever realizes that Frida has money."
He could believe that. He had never realized it himself. Her enjoyment of life was so finished an art that it kept its machinery well out of sight.
"Frida," Georgie serenely continued, "has a weakness for landscape painters. The memory of her mother—no doubt."
"Don't they—don't they bore her?"
"No. It takes a great deal to bore Frida—naturally, after the Colonel. Besides, she doesn't give them the chance. Nobody ever gets what you may call a hold on Frida. There's so much more of her than they can grasp. And there are, at least, three sides of her by which she's unapproachable. One of them's her liberty. If you or I or the little Manby man were to take liberties with her liberty Frida would——"
"What would Frida do?"