On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, 'Have you heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?'
'Extraordinary!' said Langham briefly. 'The most considerable gift I ever came across in an amateur.'
His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick observant look at him.
'The difficulty,' he exclaimed, 'is to know what to do with it!'
'Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad. What is there to prevent it?'
Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed, cabined, and confined in this way?
'I grant you,' said Robert, with a look of perplexity, 'there is not much to prevent it.'
And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice and under his influence she had made concession after concession.
'The great solution of all,' he said presently, brightening, 'would be to get her married. I don't wonder her belongings dislike the notion of anything so pretty and so flighty going off to live by itself. And to break up the home in Whindale would be to undo everything their father did for them, to defy his most solemn last wishes.'
'To talk of a father's wishes, in a case of this kind, ten years after his death, is surely excessive?' said Langham with dry interrogation; then, suddenly recollecting himself, 'I beg your pardon, Elsmere. I am interfering.'