their situation gave her a
quick expressive kiss. The foreign observer whom I took for granted in
beginning to sketch this scene would have had to admit that the rigid
English family had after all a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed
looked round her to see if at this moment they were noticed. She judged
with satisfaction that they had escaped.

II

Nick Dormer walked away with Biddy, but he had not gone far before he
stopped in front of a clever bust, where his mother, in the distance,
saw him playing in the air with his hand, carrying out by this gesture,
which presumably was applausive, some critical remark he had made to his
sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to her eyes by the long handle to
which rather a clanking chain was attached, perceiving that the bust
represented an ugly old man with a bald head; at which her ladyship
indefinitely sighed, though it was not apparent in what way such an
object could be detrimental to her daughter. Nick passed on and quickly
paused again; this time, his mother discerned, before the marble image
of a strange grimacing woman. Presently she lost sight of him; he
wandered behind things, looking at them all round.

"I ought to get plenty of ideas for my modelling, oughtn't I, Nick?" his
sister put to him after a moment.

"Ah my poor child, what shall I say?"

"Don't you think I've any capacity for ideas?" the girl continued
ruefully.

"Lots of them, no doubt. But the capacity for applying them, for putting
them into practice--how much of that have you?"

"How can I tell till I try?"

"What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?"

"Why you know--you've seen me."

"Do you call that trying?" her brother amusedly demanded.

"Ah Nick!" she said with sensibility. But then with more spirit: "And
please what do you call it?"

"Well, this for instance is a good case." And her companion pointed to
another bust--a head of a young man in terra-cotta, at which they had
just arrived; a modern young man to whom, with his thick neck, his
little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the
air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo.

Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah that's not trying; that's
succeeding."

"Not altogether; it's only trying seriously."

"Well, why shouldn't I be serious?"

"Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the fine old superstition
that art's pardonable only so long as it's bad--so long as it's done at
od