She shook her head with some impatience. “Let us be friends--as I supposed we were going to be--without protestations and fine words. To have you paying compliments to my wisdom--that would be real wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the Flemish painters can--better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all their worshippers. Go join your friend--see everything, enjoy everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming over with your impressions. I’m extremely fond of the Dutch painters,” she added with the faintest quaver in the world, an impressible break of voice that Longmore had noticed once or twice before and had interpreted as the sudden weariness, the controlled convulsion, of a spirit self-condemned to play a part. “I don’t believe you care a button for the Dutch painters,” he said with a laugh. “But I shall certainly write you a letter.” She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant simply that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the golden-hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de Mauves was silent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely, she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-fashioned epigram about “la vieille galanterie francaise”--then by a sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to come in. “I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at Saint-Germain.”