Mrs. Stewart sailed toward them with a queenly sweep that was decidedly imposing. She had decided to have a chat with young Lancaster. When she had seen him in the office of the _Torch_, and now, when he first entered the room, she had seen at a glance that he was handsome enough not to need cleverness; but she was curious to see whether he would interest her in other than visual ways. "You've been most fortunate," she said to Dick, as she reached them, "with Miss Leigh to interpret us for you. Has she told you, I wonder, that she is my favorite cousin? But now, I want to talk to you about art. If Miss Leigh will surrender you to me--?"
"I've been talking to Mr. Wooton about you," she said as she bore him away in triumph, "and he tells me you've only been in town for a few weeks. You still have vivid impressions, I suppose. When one has lived here for years and years, one's impressionability gets hardened. It takes something very forcible to really rouse us. And even then we prefer to let some one of us experience the sensation; it is so much easier to take another's word for it, and follow in the rut. That is how most of our present day fads come about. Some one gets pierced between the casings of the armour of indifference, and the rest of us take the cue and join in the chorus of ecstasy. We don't go to hear Patti or Paderewski, you know, because, we really feel their art deeply; it is because someone once felt it and it became the fashion." While she talked, she had led him into a window-nook and motioned him to a fauteuil that covered the crescent-shaped niche. As she sat down, the lines of her figure could be traced through the perfect fit of her gown. He noticed what finish, what art there was about the picture she made as she sat there, beside him. Her gown was a delicate shade of gray; the crepe seemed to love her as a vine loves a tree, so closely did it follow and cling to the lines of her hips, her waist, her shoulders. Over her sleeves, immensely wide, as the fashion of the time decreed, fell lapels of silk. She had on low shoes, and above them he could see the neat contour of her ankles, also clad in gray. "However," she went on, "I did not intend to talk of the fashion; I wanted to ask you how the town struck your artistic side. Don't you find as great pictures in a street full of life as in a valley full of shadow? Isn't there more of the history of today in the faces of the people you meet on the Avenue than in a stretch of blue sky, a white sail, and a background of Venice?"