daresay that if Peter comes Julia'll be with him," the elder girl remarked irrelevantly.
"Well then he can take Julia about. That will be more proper," said Lady Agnes.
"Mother dear, she doesn't care a rap about art. It's a fearful bore looking at fine things with Julia," Nick returned.
"Won't you go with him, Grace?"—and Biddy appealed to her sister.
"I think she has awfully good taste!" Grace exclaimed, not answering this inquiry.
"Don't say nasty things about her!" Lady Agnes broke out solemnly to her son after resting her eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant reprobation.
"I say nothing but what she'd say herself," the young man urged. "About some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of thing she has no taste at all."
"That's better, I think," said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the "kind of thing" her son appeared to designate.
"She's awfully clever—awfully!" Grace went on with decision.
"Awfully, awfully!" her brother repeated, standing in front of her and smiling down at her.
"You are nasty, Nick. You know you are," said the young lady, but more in sorrow than in anger.
Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to place herself generously at his side. "Mightn't you go and order lunch—in that place, you know?" she asked of her mother. "Then we'd come back when it was ready."
"My dear child, I can't order lunch," Lady Agnes replied with a cold impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far more important than those of victualling to contend with.
"Then perhaps Peter will if he comes. I'm sure he's up in everything of that sort."
"Oh hang Peter!" Nick exclaimed. "Leave him out of account, and do order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles."
"I must say—about him—you're not nice," Biddy ventured to remark to her brother, hesitating and even blushing a little.
"You make up for it, my dear," the young man answered, giving her chin—a very charming, rotund, little chin—a friendly whisk with his forefinger.
"I can't imagine what you've got against him," her ladyship said gravely.
"Dear mother, it's disappointed fondness," Nick argued. "They won't answer one's notes; they won't let one know where they are nor what to expect. 'Hell has no fury like a woman scorned'; nor like a man either."
"Peter has such a tremendous lot to do—it's a very busy time at the embassy; there are sure to be reasons," Biddy explained with her pretty eyes.
"Reasons enough, no doubt!" said Lady Agnes—who accompanied these words with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even the best reasons would naturally be bad ones.
"Doesn't Julia write to you, doesn't she answer you the very day?" Grace asked, looking at Nick as if she were the bold one.
He waited, returning her glance with a certain severity. "What do you know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much," he went on; "I'm so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!"
"She's younger than you, my dear!" cried the elder girl, still resolute.
"Yes, nineteen days."
"I'm glad you know her birthday."
"She knows yours; she always gives you something," Lady Agnes reminded her son.
"Her taste is good then, isn't it, Nick?" Grace Dormer continued.
"She makes charming presents; but, dear mother, it isn't her taste. It's her husband's."
"How her husband's?"
"The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the things he collected for years laboriously, devotedly, poor man!"
"She disposes of them to you, but not to others," said Lady Agnes. "But that's all right," she added, as if this might have been taken for a complaint of the limitations of Julia's bounty. "She has to select among so many, and that's a proof of taste," her ladyship pursued.
"You can't say she doesn't choose lovely ones," Grace remarked to her brother in a tone of some triumph.
"My dear, they're all lovely. George Dallow's judgement was so sure, he was incapable of making a mistake," Nicholas Dormer returned.
"I don't see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful," said Lady Agnes.
"My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry he's good enough for us to talk of."
"She did him a very great honour."
"I daresay, but he was not unworthy of it. No such enlightened collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our time."
"You think too much of beautiful objects!" Lady Agnes sighed.
"I thought you were just now lamenting that I think too little."
"It's very nice—his having left Julia so well off," Biddy interposed soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle.
"He treated her en grand seigneur, absolutely," Nick went on.
"He used to look greasy, all the same"—Grace bore on it with a dull weight. "His name ought to have been Tallow."
"You're not saying what Julia would like, if that's what you are trying to say," her brother observed.
"Don't be vulgar, Grace," said Lady Agnes.
"I know Peter Sherringham's birthday!" Biddy broke out innocently, as a pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into Nick's arm, to signify her readiness to go with him, while she scanned the remoter reaches of the garden as if it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in some such sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter.
"He's too much older than you, my dear," Grace answered without encouragement.
"That's why I've noticed it—he's thirty-four. Do you call that too old? I don't care for slobbering infants!" Biddy cried.
"Don't be vulgar," Lady Agnes enjoined again.
"Come, Bid, we'll go and be vulgar together; for that's what we are, I'm afraid," her brother said to her. "We'll go and look at all these low works of art."
"Do you really think it's necessary to the child's development?" Lady Agnes demanded as the pair turned away. And then while her son, struck as by a challenge, paused, lingering a moment with his little sister on his arm: "What we've been through this morning in this place, and what you've paraded before our eyes—the murders, the tortures, all kinds of disease and indecency!"
Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised him, but as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he quickly guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of animating her cold face as of making it colder, less expressive, though visibly prouder. "Ah dear
