ion and laughter.
Nothing pleased her more than to find Jim unfamiliar with some bit of
slang that had been used in England for twenty years; her laughter was
fresh and genuine as she explained it, and for days afterward she would
tell her friends of his unfamiliarity with what was an accepted part of
their language.

She took him to picture galleries, bewildering him with her swift
decisions. Jim might come to a stand before a portrait by Sargent.

"Isn't this wonderful, Ivy Green?" It was his own name for her, and she
liked it.

"That?" A sweeping glance would appraise it. "Yes, of course, it's quite
too extraordinary," she would concede briskly. "An impossible creature,
of course; one feels that he was laughing at her all the time--it's not
his best work, rarely!" And she would drag Jim past forty interesting
canvases to pounce upon some obscure, small painting in a dark corner.
"There!" she would say triumphantly, "isn't that astonishing! So
kyawiously frank, if you know what I mean? It's most amazing--his sense
of depth, if you know what I mean? Rarely, to splash things on in that
way, and to grasp it." A clawed little hand would illustrate grasping.
"It's astonishing!"

Jim, staring at a picture of some sky, some beach, and a face of rock,
would murmur a somewhat bewildered appreciation, looking out of the
corner of his eye, at the same time, at the attractive gondolier singing
to his pretty lady passengers, on the right, or the nice young peasant
nursing her baby in a sunny window while her mother peeled apples, on
the left.

"Of course, it's the only thing here, this year, absolutely the only
one," Mrs. Chancellor would conclude. "The rest is just one huge joke. I
know Artie Holloway--Sir Arthur, he is--quite well, and I told him so!
He's a director."

"But I don't see how you know so much about it!" Jim would say
admiringly.

"One must know about such things, my dear boy," she always answered
serenely. "One isn't an oyster, after all!"

It was this dashing lady and not Barbara who first brought Jim's mind to
a sense of his own injustice to Julia, or rather to a realization that
the situation, as it stood, was fair to neither Julia nor himself. Not
that he ever mentioned Julia to Ivy; but she knew, of course, of Julia's
existence, and being a shrewd and experienced woman she drew her own
conclusions. One day she expressed herself very frankly on the subject.

"You've taken the rooms above Sir Peveril