Hilda | Page 6

turned her head again to listen to Mrs.
Barberry. The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating the
conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and
relief.
"I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather," Mrs. Barberry
said; "I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the
Fort, and I said, 'Never again!' Fortunately the girls were just out, and
not one of them understood, but those poor boys didn't know where to
look! And no more did I. So disgustingly real."
Alicia's eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a
little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her
lips.
"I was in England last year," she said; "I--I saw A Woman of Honour in
London. What could possibly be done with it by an Australian scratch
company in a Calcutta theatre! Imagination halts."
"Miss Howe did something with it," observed Mr. Lindsay. "That and
one or two other things carried one through last cold weather. One
supported even the gaieties of Christmas week with fortitude, conscious
that there was something to fall back upon. I remember I went to the
State ball, and cheerfully."
"That's saying a good deal, isn't it?" commented Dr. Livingstone,
vaguely aware of an ironical intention. "By Jove, yes."
"Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn't he?" Mrs. Barberry said. "Such a
magnificent head. I adore him in Shakespeare."
"He knows the conventions, and uses them with security," Lindsay
replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air,
demanded: "Is the story true?"
"The story of their relations? I suppose there are fifty. One of them is."

Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a
reminiscence of amateur theatricals. "Their relations!" she murmured to
Dr. Livingstone. "What awful things to talk about."
"The story I mean," Alicia explained, "is to the effect that Mr. Bradley,
who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he met this
girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her passion for her
art--I mean, of course, her affections----"
"My dear girl, we know what you mean," cried Mrs. Barberry, entering
a protest, as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.
"And precisely the reverse happened."
"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.
"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.
"That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man,"
Lindsay contributed again.
"Tables turned, eh? Dare say it served him right," remarked Dr.
Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off."
"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught it
two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him?
Good-bye, you nice thing,"--Mrs. Barberry addressed
Alicia--"Good-bye, Mr. Lindsay. Fancy a live bacillus from Hong
Kong! I should like it better if it came from fascinating Japan, but
still--good-bye."
With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were

tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations, traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a
vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia, one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and
given forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes
thought of the bee and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the
simile as a trifle gross and material. Certainly, as she sat there in her
grace and slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
present her in. With suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a
downrightness of movement which suggested the assertion of a
primitive sincerity in a personal world of many effects. Into her making
of tea, for example, she put nothing more sophisticated than sugar,