“Yes, and all the women adore them, confound it! They mistake; they see the man full of energy and spirit, making for a given point in life, and allowing nothing to distract his attention from it, like a horse with blinkers on. They naturally want to remove the blinkers, and divert a little of that force and energy into a more useful channel, i. e., love-making. They take no account of the correlation of forces; they don’t see that what a man gives to one thing he cannot give to another, that dominated as he is by an abstraction, charming concrete objects”--he looked at Mrs. Elles--“have no chance at all!” “You are making Mr. Rivers out a mild kind of Robespierre!” “Oh, well, I don’t go so far as to suppose that he would wade through seas of blood to his ambition--let us say the painting of the most perfect landscape in the world; his easel is not a guillotine, and besides, he has more or less realized his ambition, he has everything he wants, name, and fame, and money, and the right to be as misogynistical as he pleases. He is no curmudgeon, but he is eminently unsociable. I have never even been in his studio myself, for he doesn’t go in for the vulgarity of a Show Sunday, and he is away in the country half the year, propitiating the deities of woods and streams. I meet him now and then at the Athenæum--young women, you know, are not admitted there, only bishops and so on!” “Isn’t it a great honour to belong to the Athenæum?” “Yes, especially if you are elected under Rule II. Rivers is a great swell. I shouldn’t be surprised if they made him President some day--that is, if they ever make a landscape painter President of the R. A., which they have a natural prejudice against doing.” Rule II. of the Athenæum Club--the limitations of landscape painters as Possible Presidents of the Royal Academy--it was all Greek to Mrs. Elles, but still she managed very well. Her eyes sparkled, she was gay and sympathetic; the two things that London wants. There was no denying it, she was happy here, happier than she had ever been, dining in the lonely inn with the man of her heart, though she would not for worlds have admitted such a truth had she been taxed with it. She would have liked Rivers with her here; she would have been friends with God and Mammon. Love, and the World! Rivers and she were true incompatibles; but that again she would not have owned. Looking down the table, she sometimes caught Egidia’s deep-set, serious eyes fixed on her, and immediately composed her own face to a decent semblance of mental distress, subdued and controlled by the dictates of social standards of gaiety.