"If you were Mr. Whistler--or anything in the least like Mr. Whistler--I shouldn't be drinking tea out of your honourable tea-cup," she said. "Do you really think, Mr. Temple, that one ought not to say one doesn't like people just because they're dead?" He had been thinking something a little like it. "Well," he said rather awkwardly, "you see dead people can't hit back." "No more can live ones when you don't hit them, but only stick pins in their effigies. I'd rather speak ill of the dead than the living." "Yet it doesn't seem fair, somehow," Temple insisted. "But why? No one can go and tell the poor things what people are saying of them. You don't go and unfold a shroud just to whisper in a corpse's ear: 'It was horrid of her to say it, but I thought you ought to know, dear.'--And if you did, they wouldn't lie awake at night worrying over it as the poor live people do.--No more tea, thank you." "Do you really think anyone worries about what anyone says?" "Don't you, Mr. Temple?" He reflected. "He never has anything to worry about," Vernon put in; "no one ever says anything unkind about him. The cruelest thing anyone ever said of him was that he would make as excellent a husband as Albert the Good." "The white flower of a blameless life? My felicitations," Lady St. Craye smiled them. Temple flushed. "Now isn't it odd," Vernon asked, "that however much one plumes oneself on one's blamelessness, one hates to hear it attributed to one by others? One is good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. I myself--" "Yes!" said Lady St. Craye with an accent of finality. "What a man really likes is to be saint with the reputation of being a bit of a devil." "And a woman likes, you think, to be a bit of a devil, with the reputation of a saint?" "Or a bit of a saint with a reputation that rhymes to the reality. It's the reputation that's important, isn't it?" "Isn't the inward truth the really important thing?" said Temple rather heavily. Lady St. Craye looked at him in such a way as to make him understand that she understood. Vernon looked at them both, and turning to the window looked out on his admired roofs. "Yes," she said very softly, "but one doesn't talk about that, any more than one does of one's prayers or one's love affairs." The plural vexed Temple, and he told himself how unreasonable the vexation was. Lady St. Craye turned her charming head to look at him, to look at Vernon. One had been in love with her. The other might be. There is in the world no better company than this. Temple, always deeply uninterested in women's clothes, was noting the long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious unconsciousness was the focus of their eyes.