‘There is an unexpected parry for you, my dear girl.’ Shifting his chair away from the table, Dinah’s lord began to fold himself a loose, or Spanish-modelled cigarette. Pipes and cigars of ordinary goodness Gaston would no more smoke than he would swallow any of the popular fluids known among Britons as wine. He had the virtue of facile temperance, wore the blue ribbon of a fastidious taste. Unless his small luxuries were of the choicest, he could at any time fill the anchorite’s _rôle_ without effort. ‘You had better apply to your own lawful husband, Dinah, than to Geff, when you want a compliment.’ ‘I apply to Geoffrey when I want truth.’ Dinah made this answer unconscious of the slight irony her speech conveyed. ‘The truth! When a pretty woman talks of truth,’ cried Gaston, ‘she means, “Give me the biggest, most sugared lump of praise that my moral gullet will enable me to swallow.”’ Mrs. Arbuthnot had been married close upon four years. Yet was she so much in love with Gaston still as to colour rosy red at the doubtful flattery of this remark. She was a blonde, amply framed Devonshire girl, in the fresh summer of her youth. ‘Not a lady,’ according to the traditions of small social courts, the judgments of smaller feminine tribunals. Dinah’s lips could scarcely unclose before ineradicable accents of the west country working folk informed you that Gaston Arbuthnot, like so many artists--poor dear impressionable fellows!--had married beneath him. Not a lady, as far as the enunciation of certain vowels, the absence of certain petty artificialities of female manner were concerned, but with the purity of April dawn on her cheeks, the wholesome work-a-day qualities of a long line of yeoman progenitors in her heart. About most women’s charms men are prone to hold contradictory opinions. What world-renowned beauty but has at times felt the cold breath of adverse criticism? A smile from Dinah’s pensive mouth, a gleam from Dinah’s serious eyes, appealed to all beholders. Tottering old gentlemen would turn, with spectacles hastily adjusted, to wonder; fine ladies cast looks of despair after her from their carriages; young men of every sort and condition would lose their peace, if Dinah did but demurely walk along London pavement or provincial street. She was an altogether unique specimen of our mixed and over-featured race: white and rose of complexion; chiselled of profile, with English-coloured hair (and this hair is neither gold nor flaxen nor chestnut, but a subdued blending of the three); eyebrows and eyelashes that matched; a nobly cut throat; and the slow, calm movements that belong in all countries to the fair large Madonna-like women of her type.