“That is why I find tapestry so far superior to painting,” he murmured. “The limitations of the needle are so much severer than those of the brush; their influence over the composition is so much more obvious. There is something vulgar in dexterity.” “Is there not something vulgar in expression itself?” Stuart put in. “Surely the unexpressed is always higher than the expressed?” This was a wedge driven between the opposing forces. Wickham, whose claims to consideration rested entirely on the meditations in which he was believed to indulge, could not reject the principle which justified his existence. Egerton, fretting with impatience, began to fear that he should be reduced to the coarse manœuvre of openly seizing his book and reading unasked. But even this was not to be permitted him. “For my part,” Stuart said, “I consider that as the first word of literature was the riddle, so it must be the last. Poetry is falsehood, and we should never be allowed to tell the truth. Remember that when Shakespeare ventured to talk poetry to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern, he ‘had to be stopped.’ The poet will always be stopped by respectable people when he talks prose, and that is why he has to talk poetry, which they can’t understand. Take my advice, throw your acrostics overboard, and write riddles. Write them in Sanskrit if possible, and use a cipher. That will give you all the limitations you want. And the middle class will form a Vane Society, as they have formed a Shakespeare Society and a Browning Society, to interpret you; and when you are dead they will write biographies to prove that you were fairly orthodox and perfectly respectable.” The author of the “Rosary of Twilight,” as he walked home in dudgeon, observed to the fraternal satellite: “I am afraid Stuart is deteriorating. He seems to be incapable of high seriousness.” “He needs to surround himself with pale green tapestry,” was the melancholy response. Others of Alistair’s old circle came round him in his new home, and rejoiced in this fresh defiance to the Victorian proprieties. But there was one notable absentee. The figure of the Brazilian banker was never seen in the little high-art kitchen. Since Molly Finucane had become Lady Alistair, Mendes had been struck off her visiting-list. CHAPTER XX LADY ALISTAIR SIR BERNARD VANBRUGH kept his own counsel about his conversation with Lord Alistair, as he had done about the Duke of Trent’s proposal. In a brief letter from London Alistair told Hero the truth. “If I am a scapegoat of others” (he wrote), “I cannot let you be my scapegoat. My life, I am told, must be a cul-de-sac, and you must not think of walking down it with me. I ought to have seen this all along; perhaps I did suspect it; but I was forlorn and you made me happy. Now I can only do my best not to make you miserable. Forgive my mother for her share in the mischief that has been done, and try to forgive and forget.