She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. “It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it.” “Oh it has his _tone_,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience. It was clear I insisted too much. “His tone?” she repeated with a harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour. “Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.” “Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I’m living in one of his books at all. I shouldn’t care for that in the least,” she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. “I’m afraid I’m not very literary. And I’m not artistic,” she stated. “I’m very sure you’re not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had thrust forward her limitations. “Well, whatever I am I’m very different from my husband. If you like him you won’t like me. You needn’t say anything. Your liking me isn’t in the least necessary!” “Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer. She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without unrest. But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time of the year. At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.