Temple was looking around the room.
"Jolly place you"ve got here," he said, "but it"s hard to find. I should have gone off in despair if I hadn"t met Lady St. Craye."
"We kept each other"s courage up, didn"t we, Mr. Temple? It was like arctic explorers. I was beginning to think we should have to make a camp and cook my m.u.f.f for tea."
She held out the sable and Vernon laid it on the couch when he had held it to his face for a moment.
"I love the touch of fur," he said; "and your fur is scented with the scent of summer gardens, "open jasmine m.u.f.fled lattices,"" he quoted softly. Temple had wandered to the window.
"What ripping roofs!" he said. "Can one get out on them?"
"Now what," demanded Vernon, "_is_ the hidden mainspring that impels every man who comes into these rooms to ask, instantly, whether one can get out on to the roof? It"s only Englishmen, by the way; Americans never ask it, nor Frenchmen."
"It"s the exploring spirit, I suppose," said Temple idly; "the spirit that has made England the Empire which--et cetera."
"On which the sun never sets. Yes--but I think the sunset would be one of the attractions of your roof, Mr. Vernon."
"Sunset is never attractive to me," said he, "nor Autumn. Give me sunrise, and Spring."
"Ah, yes," said Lady St. Craye, "you only like beginnings. Even Summer--"
"Even Summer, as you say," he answered equably. "The sketch is always so much better than the picture."
"I believe that is your philosophy of life," said Temple.
"This man," Vernon explained, "spends his days in doing ripping etchings and black and white stuff and looking for my philosophy of life."
"One would like to see that in black and white. Will you etch it for me, Mr. Temple, when you find it?"
"I don"t think the medium would be adequate," Temple said. "I haven"t found it yet, but I should fancy it would be rather highly coloured."
"Iridescent, perhaps. Did you ever speculate as to the colour of people"s souls? I"m quite sure every soul has a colour."
"What is yours?" asked Vernon of course.
"I"m too humble to tell you. But some souls are thick--body-colour, don"t you know--and some are clear like jewels."
"And mine"s an opal, is it?"
"With more green in it, perhaps; you know the lovely colour on the d.y.k.es in the marshes?"
"Stagnant water? Thank you!"
"I don"t know what it is. It has some hateful chemical name, I daresay. They have vases the colour I mean, mounted in silver, at the Army and Navy Stores."
"And your soul--it is a pearl, isn"t it?"
"Never! Nothing opaque. If you will force my modesty to the confession I believe in my heart that it is a sapphire. True blue, don"t you know!"
"And Temple"s--but you"ve not known him long enough to judge."
"So it"s no use my saying that I am sure his soul is a dewdrop."
"To be dried up by the sun of life?" Temple questioned.
"No--to be hardened into a diamond--by the fire of life. No, don"t explain that dewdrops don"t harden Into diamonds. I know I"m not scientific, but I honestly did mean to be complimentary. Isn"t your kettle boiling over, Mr. Vernon?"
Lady St. Craye"s eyes, while they delicately condoled with Vernon on the spoiling of his tete-a-tete with her, were also made to indicate a certain interest in the spoiler. Temple was more than six feet high, well built. He had regular features and clear gray eyes, with well-cut cases and very long dark lashes. His mouth was firm and its lines were good. But for his close-cropped hair and for a bearing at once frank, a.s.sured, and modest, he would have been much handsomer than a man has any need to be. But his expression saved him: No one had ever called him a barber"s block or a hairdresser"s apprentice.
To Temple Lady St. Craye appeared the most charming woman he had ever seen. It was an effect which she had the habit of producing. He had said of her in his haste that she was all clothes and no woman, now he saw that on the contrary the clothes were quite intimately part of the woman, and took such value as they had, from her.
She carried her head with the dainty alertness of a beautiful bird.
She had a gift denied to most Englishwomen--the genius for wearing clothes. No one had ever seen her dress dusty or crushed, her hat crooked. No uncomfortable accidents ever happened to her. Blacks never settled on her face, the b.u.t.tons never came off her gloves, she never lost her umbrella, and in the windiest weather no loose untidy wisps escaped from her thick heavy shining hair to wander unbecomingly round the ears that were pearly and pink like the little sh.e.l.ls of Vanessae.
Some of the women who hated her used to say that she dyed her hair. It was certainly very much lighter than her brows and lashes. To-day she was wearing a corduroy dress of a gold some shades grayer than the gold of her hair. Sable trimmed it, and violet silk lined the loose sleeves and the coat, now unfastened and thrown back. There were, as Vernon had known there would be, violets under the brim of the hat that matched her hair.
The chair in which she sat wore a Chinese blue drapery. The yellow tea-cups gave the highest note in the picture.
"If I were Whistler, I should ask you to let me paint your portrait like that--yes, with my despicable yellow tea-cup in your honourable hand."
"If you were Mr. Whistler--or anything in the least like Mr.
Whistler--I shouldn"t be drinking tea out of your honourable tea-cup,"
she said. "Do you really think, Mr. Temple, that one ought not to say one doesn"t like people just because they"re dead?"
He had been thinking something a little like it.
"Well," he said rather awkwardly, "you see dead people can"t hit back."
"No more can live ones when you don"t hit them, but only stick pins in their effigies. I"d rather speak ill of the dead than the living."
"Yet it doesn"t seem fair, somehow," Temple insisted.
"But why? No one can go and tell the poor things what people are saying of them. You don"t go and unfold a shroud just to whisper in a corpse"s ear: "It was horrid of her to say it, but I thought you ought to know, dear."--And if you did, they wouldn"t lie awake at night worrying over it as the poor live people do.--No more tea, thank you."
"Do you really think anyone worries about what anyone says?"
"Don"t you, Mr. Temple?"
He reflected.
"He never has anything to worry about," Vernon put in; "no one ever says anything unkind about him. The cruelest thing anyone ever said of him was that he would make as excellent a husband as Albert the Good."
"The white flower of a blameless life? My felicitations," Lady St.
Craye smiled them.
Temple flushed.
"Now isn"t it odd," Vernon asked, "that however much one plumes oneself on one"s blamelessness, one hates to hear it attributed to one by others? One is good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. I myself--"
"Yes!" said Lady St. Craye with an accent of finality.