'You are not flattering me?'
'Indeed I am not. You are the last woman I should dare to flatter!'
The beautiful clear eyes fell under his earnest gaze, and the colour rose into her face, which Earle thought at that moment almost a perfect one.
After a pause she said: 'Now, I think that both men and women would get on better if they helped each other more on common ground. The sense of superiority on your side produces aggressiveness and self-assertion on ours. Why not leave off quarrelling about who is the best, and agree to be different and yet friends?'
'People say friendship is incompatible between men and women.'
'People talk a great deal of nonsense,' she said a little positively: 'I have several men-friends.'
Somehow Earle felt nettled at this assertion, and would gladly have done battle with all these disagreeable men-friends at once. He only said, however: 'I hope one day to be happy enough to make one of them; but meanwhile, how am I to see you again?'
'Are you not coming to paint Mrs De Lacy?' said Silvia, with her eyes on her plate, but the faint trace of a smile on her lip. 'I am staying here, you know!'
'To be sure!' he cried eagerly; 'I forgot that. I'll come to-morrow and begin. But after you leave here?'
'We live at Eaglemore Gardens,' she said simply. 'I will be glad to see you, if you like to call.'