to Janet to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to
consider it with the privileges of intimacy.
These young women felt their friendship deeply, in
their several ways. It held for them all sacredness
and honor and obligation. For Elfrida it had
an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio —she
had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her
friends—and for Janet it added something
to existence that was not there before, more delightful
and important than a mere opportunity of expansion.
The time came speedily when it would have been a positive
pain to either of them to hear the other discussed,
however favorably.
Lady Halifax and her daughter had met Miss Bell several
times at the Cardiffs’, in a casual way, before
it occurred to either of them to take any sort of
advantage of the acquaintance. The younger lady
had a shivering and frightened delight in occasionally
wading ankle-deep in unconventionality, but she had-lively
recollections, in connection with the Cardiffs, of
having been very nearly taken off her feet. They
had since decided that it was more discreet to ignore
Janet’s enthusiasms, which were sometimes quite
impossible in their verdict, and always improbable.
The literary ladies and gentlemen whom the ghost of
the departed Sir William brought more or less unwillingly
to Lady Halifax’s drawing-rooms were all of
unexceptionable cachet; the Halifaxes were constantly
seeing paragraphs about them in the “Literary
Gossip” department of the Athenian, mentioning
their state of health, their retirement from scientific
appointments, or the fact that their most recent work
of fiction had reached its fourth edition. Lady
Halifax always read the Athenian, even the
publishers’ announcements; she liked to keep
“in touch,” she said, with the literary
activities of the day, and it gave her a special gratification
to notice the prosperity of her writing friends indicated
in tall figures. Miss Halifax read it too, but
she liked the “Art Notes” best; it was
a matter of complaint with her that the house was
not more open to artists—new, original
artists like John Kendal. In answer to this Lady
Halifax had a habit of stating that she did not see
what more they could possibly want than the president
of the Royal Academy and the one or two others that
came already. As for John Kendal, he was certainly
new and original, but he was respectable notwithstanding;
they could be certain that he was not putting his
originality on—with a hearth-brush, for
the sake of advertisement. Lady Halifax was not
so sure of Elfrida’s originality, of which she
had been given a glimpse or two at first, and which
the girl’s intimacy with the Cardiffs would
have presupposed in any case. But presently, and
somewhat to Lady Halifax’s perplexity, Miss
Bell’s originality disappeared. It seemed
to melt into the azure of perfect good-breeding, flecked
by little clouds of gay sayings and politenesses,
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