‘I know it, Gaston. What I want is to be lifted out of my own narrow ignorance.’ ‘Take Geoffrey, for instance. In Geoffrey we have a man sound to the core. No caprice, no vanity in our cousin, none of the discontent and levity, and thirst for amusement which disfigure some characters that might be named. For contrast,’ Gaston Arbuthnot’s eyes rested discerningly on his wife, ‘look at Rex Basire--an empty-skulled little tailor’s block, doubtless, yet with a brave soldier’s heart in him all the same! By the bye, my dear, I need not exhort you,’ he added lightly, ‘to be charitable to Lord Rex. If women would only be as fair towards each other as they are towards us! I really admired the philosophy with which you gave that young gentleman his lesson in cross-stitch to-day.’ The careless tone of banter brought back Dinah’s accustomed self-control. Nothing so effectually checks emotion as the absence of emotion in our fellow-actors. ‘Lord Rex was bent upon working three or four stitches in my ottoman. It cost me the trouble only of unpicking them, and when he asked my leave I was ignorant--I always am ignorant--about the politeness of saying “No.” That is what I must learn.’ ‘The art of saying “No,”’ observed Mr. Arbuthnot, not in a very hearty voice. ‘The art of speaking and acting--well, as Mrs. Thorne, as every woman of your world, would do! There’s no going back to old days, Gaston. You are right there. I must shape myself to things as they are, not to try to shape them to my needs. That is chiefly why I accepted the invitation for Wednesday. I mean to learn from the example of others. I mean to turn over a new leaf from to-day.’ ‘Keep true to your own transparent self, child. Be what you have been always, and I, for one, shall be contented.’ CHAPTER XX ‘JAMES LEE’S WIFE’ The speech was really the best chosen, prettiest thing that a somewhat errant husband could have found to say. In every moral encounter that befel Gaston Arbuthnot, and whether his antagonist floundered in the mud or no, Gaston seemed invariably to find himself, at the last, in a graceful attitude. But Dinah’s heart was no more warmed by honeyed little phrases than by the reconciliatory kiss her husband bestowed on her ere he started to his dinner-party. She was reaching--nay, had reached--the miserable stage when honeyed phrases and reconciliatory kisses are in themselves matters of distrust? How, her lonely dinner over, would she get through the evening hours--long counted-on hours--when she was to have walked, her hand within Gaston’s arm, to distant Roscoff Common for her briar roses.