“Look at that woman’s hat,” said Cruttendon.  “How do they come to think of it? ...  No, Flanders, I don’t think I could live like you.  When one walks down that street opposite the British Museum—­what’s it called?—­ that’s what I mean.  It’s all like that.  Those fat women—­and the man standing in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a fit ...”

“Everybody feeds them,” said Jinny, waving the pigeons away.  “They’re stupid old things.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jacob, smoking his cigarette.  “There’s St. Paul’s.”

“I mean going to an office,” said Cruttendon.

“Hang it all,” Jacob expostulated.

“But you don’t count,” said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon.  “You’re mad.  I mean, you just think of painting.”

“Yes, I know.  I can’t help it.  I say, will King George give way about the peers?”

“He’ll jolly well have to,” said Jacob.

“There!” said Jinny.  “He really knows.”

“You see, I would if I could,” said Cruttendon, “but I simply can’t.”

“I think I could,” said Jinny.  “Only, it’s all the people one dislikes who do it.  At home, I mean.  They talk of nothing else.  Even people like my mother.”

“Now if I came and lived here—–­” said Jacob.  “What’s my share, Cruttendon?  Oh, very well.  Have it your own way.  Those silly birds, directly one wants them—­they’ve flown away.”

And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of those queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which may wound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort, Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart.  They had to separate.  Something must be said.  Nothing was said.  A man wheeled a trolley past Jacob’s legs so near that he almost grazed them.  When Jacob recovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinny looked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappeared like the very great genius that he was.

No—­Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had ever met—­being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude.  Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller’s box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road.  But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest confidences to shy young Englishmen.