"Write a few" seemed to him almost as good as her "That's all." Didn't
she, as the wife of a rare artist, know what it was to produce one
perfect work of art? How in the world did she think they were turned on?
His private conviction was that, admirably as Henry St. George wrote, he
had written for the last ten years, and especially for the last five,
only too much, and there was an instant during which he felt inwardly
solicited to make this public. But before he had spoken a diversion was
effected by the return of the absentees. They strolled up
dispersedly--there were eight or ten of them--and the circle under the
trees rearranged itself as they took their place in it. They made it
much larger, so that Paul Overt could feel--he was always feeling that
sort of thing, as he said to himself--that if the company had already
been interesting to watch the interest would now become intense. He
shook hands with his hostess, who welcomed him without many words, in the
manner of a woman able to trust him to understand and conscious that so
pleasant an occasion would in every way speak for itself. She offered
him no particular facility for sitting by her, and when they had all
subsided again he found himself still next General Fancourt, with an
unknown lady on his other flank.

"That's my daughter--that one opposite," the General said to him without
lose of time. Overt saw a tall girl, with magnificent red hair, in a
dress of a pretty grey-green tint and of a limp silken texture, a garment
that clearly shirked every modern effect. It had therefore somehow the
stamp of the latest thing, so that our beholder quickly took her for
nothing if not contemporaneous.

"She's very handsome--very handsome," he repeated while he considered
her. There was something noble in her head, and she appeared fresh and
strong.