Hilda | Page 5

at the theatre. Remember you are to give the man his
orders about the brougham. I can get on perfectly with the cart.
Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you."
"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with
yawns and much whiskey and soda." She gave him a stately inclination
with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his
heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and
turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood,
but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the
altruistic army," he said.
"You saw, you heard, you know."
"But----"
"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for yourself, at
the Army Headquarters in Bentinck street--you man!"
Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way
down the stairs her voice appealed to him over the bannisters.
"You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it."
"I know you didn't," he returned. "You woman! But you
yourself--you're not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"

Hilda leaned upon the bannisters, her arms dropping over from the
elbows. "I suppose I may look at her," she said; and her smile glowed
down upon him.
"Do you think it really rewards attention--the type, I mean?"
"How you will talk of types! Didn't you see that she was unique? You
may come back, if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we will
discuss her."
Lindsay looked at his watch. "I would come back for a quarter of an
hour to discuss anything or nothing," he replied, "but there isn't time. I
am dining with the Archdeacon. I must go to church."
"Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to
church? Why not say on arrival: 'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon
and your mutton the same evening--c'est trop! I cannot so impose upon
your generosity. I have come for the mutton!'"
Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often before,
by an orthodox consideration. Duff Lindsay drove away in his cart; and
still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss Howe stood leaning
over the bannisters, her eyes fixed full of speculation on the place
where he had stood. She was thinking of a scene--a dinner with an
Archdeacon--and of the permanent satisfaction to be got from it; and
she renounced almost with a palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's
asking her.
CHAPTER II.
"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone. "It is the lowest, isn't it--in the
scale of human endowment? Mimicry."
Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned
her eyes and her delicate chin toward Duff Lindsay with the protest.
Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if
they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.

"Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's
a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen
mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway."
"You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked
Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their
energy, and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways, and
since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with it.
"I've met them in London," she said. "Oh, I remember one hot little
North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--and they were
always disappointing. There seemed to be, somehow, no basis--nothing
to go upon."
She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful,
deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were
unanimous in calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily
refined. That was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and
say; it will do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she
spoke, he might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only
to the somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must
lend a lens to find out anything at all.
"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his
words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured
to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her
comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. "But
Miss Hilda Howe has one."
"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
"I don't know. She's an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on
that."

"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but she
closed them instead and