norance
to discuss comfortably. Do you want me to vivisect my soul? You
yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?"

"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at the
same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah, Mr. Lindsay!"

There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's
greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a
difference, and that it would be necessary to find other things to say.
He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish
her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to
abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the
conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and
sugar. Alicia waited; it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the
tapestries until some reviving circumstance should bring her out again,
a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and
comments. She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that. You
know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia
Livingstone behind the tea-pot, the conviction visited her that a sex
three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.

"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible,"
Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent."

"I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm with
him. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll
combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the _Surprise Party_ on between
the acts. The only way it would go, in this capital."

"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed. "I've never seen one of his
plays--doesn't it sound terrible?"

"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should like to,
for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a
scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's no meaning. You
see, he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would be a tame
travesty--nobody could redeem it alone. You must keep to the old
situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia."

"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in _The Reproach of
Galilee_" Duff said; "everyone who knows the least bit about it said you
were marvellous in that."

"Marvellous," said Alicia.

Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking. The
others looked at her absent eyes. "A bazaar tr