“But it's no good preaching Dürer and Behm in these days,” he added pathetically, with the resignation of the collector who does not expect his hobby to be understood. Clytie laughed softly, sympathetic with his enthusiasms. No real artist can help loving the little masters. But Clytie's artistic impulses warred with each other, with circumstance, and with herself. So she refused to sit, for practical purposes, at the foot of Aldegraver. She ran over the titles of books, borrowed a couple, which he recommended, from the general literature section, stood in some dismay before the scientific specialist's library, and asked to see what was visible of the great work. He gave her some bundles of manuscript, which she turned over helplessly and handed back without a word. They were evidences of a world of infinite toil and devotion not yet intelligible to her. She gazed around the picturesque walls of the room that contrasted strangely with the carpetless floor and the fenderless grate. The absence of the minor softnesses of material life struck her vividly. There were evidences of a high love for art, but art in a too rarefied atmosphere for her nature. She would have liked to curtain the windows,--they were even destitute of blinds,--to put rugs about the floor, to soften the room with drapery, plants, flowers; even an armchair beside the fire would have been aesthetically as well as physically reposeful. Winifred's simpler feminine impulses struck the true chord. “Why doesn't your sister make you some pretty things for your room?” “She does--heaps of things.” “Where are they, then?” Kent looked at her with humorous shamefacedness. “I am afraid I have a drawer full of them somewhere,” he replied. “Well, your room is very much like yourself,” she said in a low voice, and hesitating a little. “You both lack the same thing.” And blundering John Kent misread the oracle, accepting it as a reproach for brotherly unkindness.