“Such as they are. Oh, I've read them all”—here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he added, smiling.
“I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. “We leave that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you've come to us in a missionary spirit, we'll tolerate you politely, but we'll laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”
“That really doesn't daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly. “As I told you, I'm a man with a mission.”
Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. “Bravo! And you've come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?”
MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”
“I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary judicially. “I can't understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light goes,—which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you can see her when she returns from Italy.”
“I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.
“No, I can't say that she is. She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don't recover from wounds of that sort—at least, not women of Ellen's grain. They go on bleeding inwardly.”
“You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled,” MacMaster ventured.
“Oh I give him his dues. He was a colorist, I grant you; but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger found it so.”