"That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man," Lindsay
contributed again.

"Tables turned, eh? Dare say it served him right," remarked Dr.
Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off."

"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught it
two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him?
Good-bye, you nice thing,"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--"Good-bye,
Mr. Lindsay. Fancy a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it
better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--good-bye."

With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations, traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a
vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia, one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
bee and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a trifle
gross and material. Certainly, as she sat there in her grace and
slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early morning
about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight