Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation, Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls. "You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you." "If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal, and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way. When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina. "But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly. "Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a living. I live _on_ such stuff as that. I live _for_ Art." "It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her thin, tiny hands together. Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval. "My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know." "I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly. "I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that. Do _you_ love your neighbor, Miss Grey?" "I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it, only that I don't care for people." Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display. Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured her own. Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces. "The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh, yes!" "There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself." "For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do some good for your fellow creatures?"