Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner
had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of
displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it
years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.
Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and
untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.
Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.
Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence
as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals
when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have
to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have
them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the
cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for
tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter
profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies,
while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the
innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they
understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved