"Do you really think anyone worries about what anyone says?"
"Don't you, Mr. Temple?"
He reflected.
"He never has anything to worry about," Vernon put in; "no one ever says anything unkind about him. The cruelest thing anyone ever said of him was that he would make as excellent a husband as Albert the Good."
"The white flower of a blameless life? My felicitations," Lady St. Craye smiled them.
Temple flushed.
"Now isn't it odd," Vernon asked, "that however much one plumes oneself on one's blamelessness, one hates to hear it attributed to one by others? One is good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. I myself--"
"Yes!" said Lady St. Craye with an accent of finality.
"What a man really likes is to be saint with the reputation of being a bit of a devil."
"And a woman likes, you think, to be a bit of a devil, with the reputation of a saint?"
"Or a bit of a saint with a reputation that rhymes to the reality. It's the reputation that's important, isn't it?"
"Isn't the inward truth the really important thing?" said Temple rather heavily.
Lady St. Craye looked at him in such a way as to make him understand that she understood. Vernon looked at them both, and turning to the window looked out on his admired roofs.
"Yes," she said very softly, "but one doesn't talk about that, any more than one does of one's prayers or one's love affairs."
The plural vexed Temple, and he told himself how unreasonable the vexation was.
Lady St. Craye turned her charming head to look at him, to look at Vernon. One had been in love with her. The other might be. There is in the world no better company than this.
Temple, always deeply uninterested in women's clothes, was noting the long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious unconsciousness was the focus of their eyes.
"Here comes a millionaire, to buy your pictures," she said suddenly,--"no--a millionairess, by the sound of her high-heeled shoes. How beautiful are the feet--"
The men had heard nothing, but following hard on her words came the sound of footsteps along the little corridor, an agitated knock on the door.
Vernon opened the door--to Betty.
"Oh--come in," he said cordially, and his pause of absolute astonishment was brief as an eye-flash. "This is delightful--"