It was the Doña, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La Bruyère’s amateur of tulips.
“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.
“Hullo, Guy! Been writing any more poetry?”
This was Dick’s invariable greeting of him.
Then he wandered off towards the house—a trifle crestfallen. “_I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature._” Yes; but wasn’t that begging the question, the direct question he had asked whether she liked his poetry? And one could be “an amazingly brilliant creature,” and, at the same time, but an indifferent writer. Marie Bashkirsteff, for instance, whose journal he had come upon in an attic at home, mouldering away between a yellow-backed John Strange Winter and a _Who’s Who_ of the nineties; no one could deny that socially she must have been extremely brilliant, but, to him, it had seemed incredible that the world should have failed to perceive that her “self-revelations” were to a large extent faked, and her imagination a tenth-rate one. And now, both as painter and writer, Time had shown her up, together with the other _pompiers_ whose work had made such a brave show in the Salons of the eighties, or had received such panegyrics in the _Mercure de France_.
He felt sick as he thought of time, in fifteen years ... ten years ... having corroded the brilliant flakes of contemporary paint, faded the arabesque of strange words and unexpected thoughts, and revealed underneath the grains of pounce.
Brilliant ... there was Oscar Wilde, of course ... but then, Oscar Wilde!
He must find out what value exactly she attached to brilliancy.
It was past seven o’clock when Captain Roderick Dundas and Mr. David Munroe drove up side by side to Plasencia.
If they did not find much to say to each other, the fault was not Rory’s; for he was a friendly creature, ready, as he put it, “to babble to any one at his grandmother’s funeral.”
In appearance he was rather like Guy, only much taller. They had both inherited considerable prettiness from their respective mothers—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” whose beauty and high spirits had made a great stir at their _début_ in the eighties.