which to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced
for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.
And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle
(with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up;
and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one
flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden
in the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain
or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was
ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering
a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.
At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it)
the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly
in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
liked it. For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or
inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers
than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
of Moon. Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody
can understand, and Smith's manners were as courteous as they
were unconventional. She said he was "a real gentleman," by which she
simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.
She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat,