The pathetic image of Robbie as an artist made Gaston laugh inwardly. He was not struck by the humour of hearing his own name coupled with Michael Angelo’s. Nay, it might be well, he thought, if Dinah felt this passion of unselfish helpfulness; well, if Dinah occasionally gave him the kind of praise he got from Linda Thorne. For Dinah never flattered. Her words of encouragement, unlettered country girl though she was, were full of soundest criticism. There was no honey in them. True love has its intuitions. Dinah knew that to feed this man on constantly sugared words was to poison him. She would gladly have seen in Gaston a noble discontent, gladly have listened to less frank avowals that he had found his level, and got on pretty well, there! Dinah, in short, was not a delightful acquaintance, but a steadfast, loyal wife. And her praise, in common with that of other steadfast wives, was apt to take the wholesome bitterness, the slightly sub-acid flavour of a tonic. ‘Michael Angelo! My dear Mrs. Thorne, how much, how very much you over-estimate me! If you spoke of me as imitating, from afar, the little affected prettinesses of a Greuze, the compliment would be too high.’ ‘I fixed my standard for you, years ago, Mr. Arbuthnot. In the days when you used to thank me--_me_, a governess--for playing dance-music at Madame Benjamin’s, I had my convictions as to the place you would one day occupy in Art.’ At other times--on the morning, for instance, when we first saw the Arbuthnot trio in the garden of Miller’s Hotel--Linda remembered her aspirations as to the place her friend would, one day, hold in the House of Commons. But Gaston, if he noted the discrepancy, passed it generously over. Hard for a man to believe a charming woman insincere simply because she a little over-estimates his own genius! ‘Those light-hearted salad days! When I was with de Camors this afternoon----’ ‘The effusive little Frenchman who so nearly kissed you?’ ‘As long as I forgot the children, and the twelve stone of mamma, and the fact that de Camors himself is growing bald, I could have believed he and I were six-and-thirty again. Six-and-thirty used to be the sum of our joint ages.’ ‘Do not talk of age. It is a subject about which a man may jest, while a woman just breaks her heart.’ And Linda extended towards him her thin adroit hands, clasped in a pose that she had studied, not unsuccessfully, as one of pained entreaty. ‘Women are younger, relatively, than men,’ answered Gaston, with the sincerity of his sex. ‘When I was two-and-twenty, Dinah’s age, I knew more of the world than I know now. Whereas my wife----’