"Whrrr!" said Lady Blanchemain, fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief. Then she eyed him suspiciously. "You're hiding the nine million other causes up your sleeve. It isn't merely the 'whole blessed thing' that's keeping an eaglet of your feather alone in an improbable nest like this--it's some one particular thing. In my time," she sighed, "it would have been a woman."
"And no wonder," riposted John, with a flowery bow.
"You're very good--but you confuse the issue," said she. "In my time the world was young and romantic. In this age of prose and prudence--_is_ it a woman?"
"The world is still, is always, young and romantic," said John, sententious. "I can't admit that an age of prose and prudence is possible. The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly. The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful to make it so."
"_Is_ it a woman?" repeated Lady Blanchemain.
"And the three gifts are," said he, "Faith, and the sense of Beauty, and the sense of Humour."
"And I should have thought, an attractive member of the opposite sex," said she. "_Is_ it a woman?"
"Well," he at last replied, appearing to take counsel with himself, "I don't know why I should forbid myself the relief of owning up to you that in a sense it is."
"Hurray!" cried she, moving in her seat, agog, as one who scented her pet diversion. "A love affair! I'll be your confidante. Tell me all about it."
"Yes, in a sense, a love affair," he confessed.
"Good--excellent," she approved. "But--but what do you mean by 'in a sense'?"
"Ah," said he, darkly nodding, "I mean whole worlds by that."
"I don't understand," said she, her face prepared to fall.
"It isn't one woman--it's a score, a century, of the dear things," he announced.
"It's a love affair with a type," he explained.
She frowned upon him. "A love affair with a type--?"
She shook her head. "I give you up. In one breath you speak like a Mohammedan, in the next like--I don't know what."
"With these," said John, his band stretched towards the wall. "With the type of the Quattrocento."
He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire, half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm, glimmered in his eyes.