"Thank you. 'Company' is gratifying. For a month we have been a
'troupe'--in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling. Fifteen
of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with
light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors
with a thousand candlepower. Bradley and I will have to do most of the
serious work. But I have improved--oh, a lot. You wouldn't know my Lady
Whippleton."

It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.

"Then Bradley is here too?" he remarked.

"Oh yes," she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face. "But it
is much better than it was, really. He is hardly ever troublesome now.
He understands. And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.
You know," she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view,
"as an artist he has my unqualified respect."

"You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they
are not women," Duff said. "I don't believe their behaviour is a bit
more affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the
higher mathematics."

She turned indignant eyes on him. "Fancy YOUR saying that! Fancy your
having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry! At what
Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?" she cried derisively.
"Well, it shows that one can't trust one's best friend loose among the
conventions!"