It was Dr. Gardner’s word.  Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the incomprehensible his word had weight.  Vagueness was his foible, the relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen.  The spirit that looked at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses) seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream.  In that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie’s.  They had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than Thurston Square.  That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher’s kind.  It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything.  It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

“My dear,” said Mrs. Eliott, “he’s a saint, if you’re to believe Anne.”

Even Dr. Gardner smiled.  “I can’t say that’s exactly what I should call him.”

“Need we,” said Mr. Eliott, “call him anything?  So long as she thinks him a saint—­”

Mr. Eliott—­Mr. Johnson Eliott—­hovered on the borderland of culture, with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact sciences.  He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as well as his wife’s merits.  He too had his little weaknesses.  Almost savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference.  There was no part of Mr. Eliott’s mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the imputation of conviction.  A hunted thing in his wife’s drawing-room, Mr. Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective colouring of stupidity.

“How can she?” said Miss Proctor.  “She’s a saint herself, and she ought to know the difference.”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Gardner, “that’s why she doesn’t.”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Eliott, “it was the original attraction.  There could be no other for Anne.”

“The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice.  Whatever she’s makes of Mr. Majendie, she’s bent on making a martyr of herself.”  Miss Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance to all mystery.  “It’s quite simple.  This marriage is a short cut to canonisation, that’s all.”

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke.  She had been married for a year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy.  Her voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.