Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this beginning particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should never be able to like Mary Blanchet's brother. "Oh, why do women have brothers?" she asked herself. There seemed something dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's proceeding despite the frank completeness of his confession.
"Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice; didn't do her common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed.
"If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, "I would say that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the kind and generous things I have heard of."
"Yes; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with tears of gratefulness blinking in her eyes; "and we'll not say a word more about it, Minola; not a word, indeed, dear." And she put a deprecating little hand upon Minola's arm.
Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls.
"You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you."
"If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.
"But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly.
"Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a living. I live on such stuff as that. I live for Art."
"It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her thin, tiny hands together.