Gaston Arbuthnot, at this mention of a letter, felt the ground grow solid beneath his feet. ‘I must have written to you from Cambridge; for the moment, perhaps, had taken up some of Geff’s fads. Let me introduce my cousin, by the bye. Geoffrey Arbuthnot--Mrs. Thorne.’ Mrs. Thorne, who knew that in Geoffrey Arbuthnot she would never have a friend, smiled ambrosially. Geff rose. He gave the lady the lowest, at the same time the coldest bow in the world. It was a true case of elective dislike at first sight. ‘Yes,’ went on Gaston, ‘I remember.’ He drew forward a garden-chair, into which Mrs. Thorne--no unpleasing picture in her broad Leghorn hat, her cambric morning gown, her eight-buttoned gloves, her cream-coloured sunshade--sank gracefully. ‘I had taken up one of Geff’s fads. The British Workman was an epidemic among all classes of Cambridge undergraduates that term. Get hold of your poorer brother in his hour of sobriety--that is to say, on a Friday afternoon. Present him with a bookshelf of your own carving. Explain to him the newest thing out in draining-pipes. Show him how to make a window-box of rough cork, and present him with half a dozen slips of scarlet geranium. Humanise him--always, of course, with the capital H. Humanise him!’ ‘You call work so utterly noble as this “a fad”? I assure you, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, I am wild myself about the working classes. At this very moment I ought to be visiting among my district people.’ Mrs. Thorne’s eyes offered Geoffrey a glance of tentative sympathy. ‘Different men come to the same end by different roads,’ said Gaston. ‘Your greatest English authority on culture declares that any man with a dash of genius is the born elevator of others. I believe myself to have a dash--a thin streak, rather--of genius. I believe myself to be a born elevator, but it must be in my own way.’ ‘And that is?’ asked Geoffrey. ‘Well, remembering the atmosphere of Barnwell and Chesterton, the scene of our early labours, one feels sure that the geraniums must have choked for want of air. Remembering the clay soil, the neighbourhood of that oozy river, the thick air, the black ugliness,’ Gaston shivered unaffectedly, ‘one is sceptical even as to draining-pipes. My opinion is--that the English must be regenerated by art, by sculpture notably, owing to the low price of plaster casts. Sculpture can be best studied in Italy, and I am on my road thither. But Geff and I may still be fellow-labourers in the same cause.’ Gaston rattled forth this specimen of ‘poker talk’ lightly, his sombrero pulled low on his forehead, his shrewd, thought-reading eyes making observation the while of Linda--Linda whom, in long-dead Paris days, he just liked too well to be ever, for one moment, in love with. And the result of his study was that, in her Leghorn hat and cambric gown and slim, eight-buttoned gloves, Linda Constantia Thorne looked undeniably picturesque.