Morland exchanged casual remarks with Norma. She answered absently. The change in Aline from the unsmiling primness wherewith Morland's society had cloaked her to sunny merriment with Colonel Pawley was too marked to escape her attention. In spite of the ludicrousness of the comparison, she could not help perceiving that the old man who radiated boredom had a quality of charm unpossessed by Morland, and she felt absurdly disappointed with her lover. During the last few days she had made up her mind to like him. Sober forecast of a lifetime spent in the inevitable intimacy of marriage had forced her to several conclusions. One, that it was essential to daily comfort that a woman should find the personality of a husband pleasing rather than antipathetic. With more ingenuousness than the world would have put to her credit, she had set herself deliberately to attain this essential ideal. The natural consequence was a sharply critical attitude and a quickly developing sensitiveness, whereby, as in a balance of great nicety, the minor evidences of his character were continually being estimated. Thus, Morland's jest before luncheon had jarred upon her. His careless air of patronage had betrayed a lack of appreciation of something--the word “spiritual” was not in her vocabulary, or she might have used it--of something, at all events, in his friend which differentiated him from the casual artist and which she herself had, not without discomfort, divined at their first meeting. The remark had appeared to her in bad taste. Still ruffled, she became all the more critical, and noted with displeasure his failure to have won a child's esteem. And yet she felt a touch of resentment against Jimmie for being the innocent cause of her discomposure. It gave rise to a little feline impulse to scratch him and see whether he were not mortal like every one else. “Do you ever exhibit at the Royal Academy?” she asked suddenly. “They won't have me,” said he. “But you send in, don't you?” “With heart-breaking regularity. They did have me once.” He sighed. “But that was many years ago, when the Academy was young and foolish.” “I have heard they are exceedingly conservative,” said Norma, with the claws still unsheathed. “Perhaps you work on too original lines.” But she could draw from him no expression of vanity. He smiled. “I suppose they don't think my pictures good enough,” he said simply. “Jimmie's work is far too good for that wretched Academy,” said Connie Deering. “The pictures there always give you a headache. Jimmie's never do.” “I should like to kill the Academy,” Aline broke in sharply, on the brink of tears. A little tragedy of murdered hopes lurked in her tone. Then, seeing that she had caused a startled silence, she reddened and looked at her plate. Jimmie laughed outright.