第18章

"If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment.There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine kinds.Oh the shams--those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there."Ah it doesn't matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful;strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable.He had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs.Ambient, Imust add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace.Iwatched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage.Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame.Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism.She might have been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles)the very angel of the pink of propriety--putting the pink for a principle, though I'd rather put some dismal cold blue.Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what.

He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty.In looking for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant--that he might well have owed her a brief poetic inspiration.It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled, more delicately tinted and petalled.

If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction.It may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there--a desire to prove himself not after all so mismated.Dolcino continued to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come downstairs after his dinner.As soon as we had risen from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished.It happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if Inow knew all the secrets of the Ambients.I passed with her into the garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house.It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly and made them safe for leisure and talk.The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell.It struck me as a place to offer genius every favour and sanction--not to bristle with challenges and checks.Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.

"Well, of most things," I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn't talked of Miss Ambient.

"And don't you think some of his theories are very peculiar?""Oh I guess I agree with them all." I was very particular, for Miss Ambient's entertainment, to guess.

"Do you think art's everything?" she put to me in a moment.

"In art, of course I do!"

"And do you think beauty's everything?"