“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m preaching,” she apologized.

“No,” he said impatiently, “no.”

“To answer your question, then, if I were a man of independent means, I think I should go into politics.  And I should put on my first campaign banner the words, ‘No Compromise.’”

It was a little strange that, until now—­to-night-she had not definitely formulated these ambitions.  The idea of the banner with its inscription had come as an inspiration.  He did not answer, but sat regarding her, drumming on the cloth with his strong, brown fingers.

“I have learned this much in New York,” she said, carried on by her impetus, “that men and women are like plants.  To be useful, and to grow properly, they must be firmly rooted in their own soil.  This city seems to me like a luxurious, overgrown hothouse.  Of course,” she added hastily, “there are many people who belong here, and whose best work is done here.  I was thinking about those whom it attracts.  And I have seen so many who are only watered and fed and warmed, and who become —­distorted.”

“It’s extraordinary,” replied Chiltern, slowly, “that you should say this to me.  It is what I have come to believe, but I couldn’t have said it half so well.”

Mrs. Grainger gave the signal to rise.  Honora took Chiltern’s arm, and he led her back to the drawing-room.  She was standing alone by the fire when Mrs. Maitland approached her.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” she asked.

CHAPTER III

VINELAND

It was a pleasant Newport to which Honora went early in June, a fair city shining in the midst of summer seas, a place to light the fires of imagination.  It wore at once an air of age, and of a new and sparkling unreality.  Honora found in the very atmosphere a certain magic which she did not try to define, but to the enjoyment of which she abandoned herself; and in those first days after her arrival she took a sheer delight in driving about the island.  Narrow Thames Street, crowded with gay carriages, with its aspect of the eighteenth and it shops of the twentieth century; the whiffs of the sea; Bellevue Avenue, with its glorious serried ranks of trees, its erring perfumes from bright gardens, its massed flowering shrubs beckoning the eye, its lawns of a truly enchanted green.  Through tree and hedge, as she drove, came ever changing glimpses of gleaming palace fronts; glimpses that made her turn and look again; that stimulated but did not satisfy, and left a pleasant longing for something on the seeming verge of fulfilment.

The very stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces suggested the enchanter’s wand.  To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the rock-bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and screaming gulls circle where now the swallows hovered about the steep blue roof of a French chateau.  Hundreds of years hence, would these great pleasure houses still be standing behind their screens and walls and hedges? or would, indeed, the shattered, vine-covered marble of a balustrade alone mark the crumbling terraces whence once the fabled owners scanned the sparkling waters of the ocean?  Who could say?