In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the homely meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the cottage there were two small bedrooms with frequent changing patterns in dimity and chintz, with many tinted china ornaments and holy pictures that all combined to present the likeness of two glass cases enshrining an immoderately gay confusion of flowers and fruit and birds. Here in these ultimate September days of summer’s reluctant farewell life had all the rich placidity of an apricot upon a sun-steeped wall. Michael, while Stella practiced really hard, read Gregorovius’ History of the Papacy; and when she stopped suddenly he would wake half-startled from the bloody horrors of the tenth century narrated laboriously with such cold pedantry, and hear above the first elusive silence swallows gathering on the green common, robins in their autumnal song, and down a corridor the footfalls and tinkling keys of Ursule. It was natural that such surroundings should beget many intimate conversations between Michael and Stella, and if anything were wanting to give them a sense of perfect ease the thought that here at Compiègne three years ago they had realized one another for the first time always smoothed away the trace of shyness. “Whether I had come out to Paris or not,” asked Michael earnestly, “there never would have been anything approaching a love-affair between you and that fellow Ayliffe?” He had to recur to this uneasy theme. “There might have been, Michael. I think that people who like me grow to rely tremendously on themselves require rather potty little people to play about with. It’s the same sort of pleasure one gets from eating cheap sweets between meals. With somebody like George, one feels no need to bother to sustain one’s personality at highest pitch. George used to be grateful for so little. He really wasn’t bad.” “But didn’t you feel it was undignified to let him even think you might fall in love with him? I don’t want to be too objectionably fraternal, but if Ayliffe was as cheap as you admit, you ran the risk of cheapening yourself.” “Only to other people,” Stella argued, “not to myself. My dear Michael, you’ve no idea what a relief it is sometimes to play on the piano a composition that is really easy—ridiculously, fatuously easy.” “But you wouldn’t choose that piece for public performance,” Michael pointed out. He was beginning to feel the grave necessity of checking Stella’s extravagance. “Surely the public you saw gathered round me in Paris wasn’t very important?” She laughed in almost contemptuous remembrance. “Then why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you make out now?” “I wanted a corrective,” Stella explained.