'Not on Government House list, I venture to believe,' said Dora.
That in itself may show to what depths we sink. Yet it was a
trenchant and a reasonable speculation.

'It may be a newcomer,' I suggested, but she shook her head. 'All
newcomers call upon us,' she said. 'There in the middle of the Mall
we escape none of them. He isn't a calling person.'

'Why do you say "he"? You are very confident with your pronouns.
There's a delicacy of feeling--'

'Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by
delicacy of feeling; we're not strong enough to express it with
brushes. A man can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic,
and so we see it. With a woman it's everything--all over the place-
-and of no effect. Oh, I assure you, I. Armour is a man.'

'Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.'

'Taste!' exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of
her mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she
would store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my
pretensions, a person of the truest feeling. 'He sees things.'

'There's an intensity,' I ventured.

'That's better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour.
Look at that.' She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six
inches by four, in which the light seemed to come and go as it does
in a sapphire.