Even this was not so distressing as her making exceptions to her indifference to English art in the persons of two artists whom George had always been accustomed to consider legitimate butts for satire. The beautiful, mournful women, with clinging draperies, looking out of the canvas with sadly questioning eyes, imaginative conceptions of an artist who has founded a school plentifully lacking in genius, filled Nouna with grave pleasure, and caused her to turn to George in eager demand for sympathy. “Eh? Do you like them?” said he, surprised. “Why he’s the man who started the æsthetic craze; all the women took to starving themselves, and to going about like bundles of limp rags, to look like the gaunt creatures in his pictures.” “That was silly,” said Nouna promptly. “The women in the pictures mean something, and they don’t care how they look; a woman who just dressed herself up like them would mean nothing, and would care only for how she looked.” George thought this rather a smart criticism, and forgave her peculiar taste on the strength of it; still, he believed himself to be quite on the safe side when he said, taking her arm to point out a picture on the opposite wall by another artist: “You won’t want me to admire that smudge, I hope, Nouna?” She remained silent, considering it, and then said gravely:-- “It isn’t a smudge, it’s a lady.” “Well, do you like it?” “I like her better than the babies, and ladies, and cows, and mountains in the Royal Academy.” “But it takes half an hour to find out what it is.” “That’s better than making you wish it wasn’t there.” After that George gave her up, and began to perceive that it would need a critic more apt than he was to deal aright with her perverse but intelligent ignorance. His third means of developing what was noblest in his wife’s character was, of course, religion. George was not religious himself, but it seemed a shocking thing for a woman not to be so, and still more for her to lie under the suspicion of practising the rites of an occult pagan faith. So he took her to church, where she shook with laughter at the curate’s appearance and voice, and yawned, and played with her husband’s fingers during the sermon. “Oh, George, how clever it was of you not to laugh at the little man in white!” she cried, with a burst of laughter, at the church-door, when she had hurried down the aisle with indecorous haste. “Now I’ve been once to please you, you won’t make me go again, will you? It reminds me so dreadfully of the horrid Sundays at school.” “Well, but don’t you like being in the church where we were married, darling?” he asked gently. “Oh, but I can remember I’m married to you without going in again,” she answered laughing.