By an understanding convenient to everybody, Lady Sombrewater retained the right to use a tone of authority with her daughter, and now she ordered her daughter to bed. Swiftly she went to bed herself, thus putting disobedience out of sight. The other two ladies followed, shepherding Ruby. It very often happened that Ambrose spent the last half-hour before bedtime in conversation with those two. It was Lord Sombrewater’s custom to drink a whisky-and-soda and to smoke a cigar, and Lychnis would chatter or gloom or behave idiotically, as her mood might be. To-night she gloomed. “Cross to-night, Licky?” asked her father. “Dissatisfied.” She pulled a lock of hair over her eyes and bit it—a trick of childhood when people looked at her and she was sulking. “What beautiful hands Sir Richard Frew-Gaff has got!” she said. “They move like beings, with minds, contriving things. Mine are merely something to finish the shape of the arm.” Ambrose looked at her arms and hands—orchids waving on stalks. Fit to express passion, they might be considered. He looked at her feet. She had pale green stockings to go with her emerald dress, and dark green snake-skin shoes. Her dress was a sheath to the flower of her body. Underneath, as Lady Sombrewater had told him, thinking him a most suitable recipient for the confidence—underneath she wore tenderest stalk-green silk. She liked to feel that her clothes were petals, a living integument of nature. “Been working too hard?” said Lord Sombrewater. “No,” she answered emphatically. “I don’t think I work at all. What I do comes to me, and it’s not tiring.” “Well,” he observed, “it makes you scratch your head a good deal, judging by your hair.” Her hair was erratic in disposition. Loosed from control, it grew and flowed from her head in fan-like streams. There was evidence that her hand had been plunged recently in its depths, for the tonic effect of irritation on the sap of her genius. She took out the pins, and her hair spread and rippled down her emerald dress, so that to the queer, associative mind of Ambrose she seemed to gloom from a torrent of some cascading tropic fern. The high forehead, heavy with thought, the considering eyes, with the lids and the shadows that spoke of what he chooses to call her plant-like passions, were seen in a wavy, ferny fountain. Nor does he stop at that in his curious description. He often describes her as plant-like, but here he talks of her as having affinities with the insect. He says that she produced an effect on him as if she were an insect, with a remote, non-human mind, regarding him from among the fronds of a fern. “Still, I’m not tired,” she said, enigmatically smiling. “Nevertheless, you had better go to bed,” put in Ambrose.