Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval.
"My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know."
"I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly.
"I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that. Do you love your neighbor, Miss Grey?"
"I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it, only that I don't care for people."
Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display. Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured her own.
Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces.
"The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh, yes!"
"There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself."
"For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do some good for your fellow creatures?"