“You should write a book yourself!” suggested Egidia, indulgently, knowing well the answer she would receive.
“Ah! I haven’t time. But if I did, I could put in things—things that have happened to me—experience—more of feeling than of incident, perhaps. I was an only daughter; my father was in the army; I travelled a good deal; but I have not had a life of adventure; I married when I was seventeen. My husband was a widower then, and his son, Charles, lives with us—and his aunt, Mrs. Poynder.” She had an involuntary little shudder. “He is a solicitor; you know that. And he has a huge practice. He is very much occupied, and takes no interest in the things you and I care about. Of course, he laughs at me for my—enthusiasms—but I should die if I didn’t.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Some day, if you will, you must come and stop with me in town,” said Egidia, in an access of womanly compassion for this somewhat ungrammatical but sincere tale of misfortune.
“Shall I? Shall I? Oh, how lovely that would be!” Her brilliant smile came out again. “To see—to have a glimpse of all those wonderful literary people in whose company your life is spent.”
“Well, I happen to know more of artists than I do of literary people,” said Egidia. “You see, my own ‘shop’ bores me. Do you collect—I am sure you do?” She had seen the unmistakable flame of the autograph-fever leap into Mrs. Elles’ eyes. “I can send you some, if you like. I have one in my pocket now that I can give you, from Edmund Rivers, the landscape painter.”
“The R. A.?” Mrs. Elles, who always took care to have a Royal Academy Catalogue sent up to her every year, and learnt it by heart, enquired eagerly.
“Yes, the R. A. and my second cousin!” Egidia answered, carelessly pulling a crumpled note out of her pocket and handing it to Mrs. Elles. “Read it!”
“Dear Alice,” (read Mrs. Elles), “I am so sorry that I cannot have the pleasure of dining with you on the 31st, but I hope to be in the North on the 26th, at latest, to begin my summer campaign. I see the spring buds in the parks, and the Inspector of Nuisances has invited me to clip my sprouting lilac bushes, and it all reminds me too painfully of the paradise of greenness that is growing up in the country, and calling me. I shall soon be ‘a green thought in a green shade’—as Marvel says, and very much in my element. Yours ever, Edmund Rivers.”
“The twenty-sixth,” said Mrs. Elles, meditating. “This is the thirtieth. Then he is gone.”