More than that, it was dangerous; dangerous to Mrs. Marling, dangerous to Settlemarsh. There had always been rebellious provinces on the fringe of Mrs. Marling’s dominion, and these, as the central authority seemed to weaken, began to hold up their heads. Mrs. Peets had to order a new tea-service, so thronged was her table, and there were some who preferred its vigorous blue and yellow stripes to Mrs. Marling’s gold and white, just as there were some who preferred her house with its tiers of wooden balconies painted white to the Victorian exterior of The Grove. Everyone acknowledged that The Grove had been a good house in its day and for its time. But now even its habitués began to look at it with purged and critical eyes. They saw the brickwork, once yellow, now dingy with smoke, relieved by string-courses, also brick, of a hard, dark, metallic blue. They observed that the serviceable and decorative magnolias which swarmed the walls and were cut back (so Mrs. Peets said) to exhibit the blue-brick arabesque did not really conceal the scaffolding of drain-pipes with which Mrs. Marling’s grandfather, at the coming of the bathroom age, had fortified the walls. At Mrs. Peets’s you had air and light and virgin soil. But when you went to The Grove you were conscious that the trees from which it took its name, a respectable cluster, larger than a shrubbery but smaller than a spinney, were on their last legs, and that one was trying to do duty for two; that the soil was sour and impoverished and, like an old coat, looked the more threadbare for its careful raking and tending; that every shrub would be an elderberry if it could, every flower a lobelia, every fern an aspidistra.

‘And how many of them have had their wish!’ thought Mrs. Stornway, as she trod lightly over the earthy gravel of the drive, her eyes still dazzled by the remembrance of Mrs. Peets’s carriage sweep, a veritable shingle-bank for depth and glitter. Poor Alice! Sooner or later she had to become a back number. How could she hope to keep pace, Mrs. Stornway ruminated, as a blue-slated turret of vaguely ogee outline burst into view, with the growth of the town, the newcomers who gave you cocktails at tea, and whose baths filled in a moment, so fierce and sudden was the rush of water? How could she make herself felt, exert her authority over a society whose members dropped in casually on each other, who might as easily as not precede the servant into the drawing-room, whose very clothes had a different aim from hers? How easily people of to-day moved! Just as the whim took them, they got up, they sat down, they sprawled, lounged, and smoked; their conversation was short, sharp, and informal, familiar and pert. Mrs. Marling’s words, like her attitudes, were poured into a mould; they had no elasticity, no give-and-take! She had ruled, indeed, by getting people into her house and making them feel so strange, so tense, so awkward, so incapable of movement, that she could do anything she liked with them! She had no notion of how to make her guests feel relaxed and comfortable. ‘Poor Alice!’ thought Mrs. Stornway again. ‘The sap of her mind is dried up. She can’t absorb fresh subjects. Look how hide-bound she is about Mr. Blandfoot’s picture! She affects not to take any interest in it. I really must speak to her seriously!’

But as she confronted Mrs. Marling’s slightly ecclesiastical porch, smothered in soiled ivy and surmounted by crockets and finials, her brave thoughts began to change colour. And when, in response to her inquiry, the butler had gone to find out whether Mrs. Marling was in and Mrs. Stornway remembered that rarely as Mrs. Marling left her home, as rarely was she at it, those thoughts died completely. She waited; the sombre trophies from India and the Boxer Rebellion, scraps of armour without faces, scraps of faces without armour, pallid wooden hands projecting from hollow sleeves supporting flower pots, completed her discomfiture. She watched the butler returning from the far end of the long hall, his advancing figure silhouetted against a large window, enclosed in an oblong frame of stained glass. Till the man spoke, she could not tell, no one could have told, whether Mrs. Marling was at home or not. And as he conducted her towards the drawing-room, walking a little in front and a little to one side, he might have been taking one ghost to interview another.

At first Mrs. Marling did not seem to notice her visitor; she stretched her work out in front of her and peered over the edge in an abstracted fashion. Then suddenly she rose.

‘My dear Eva, to think of you coming all this way, and in this heat, to talk to a poor imbecile like me! I can tell you how flattered I feel. Nobody ever comes to see me now.’

The slightly complacent tone in which she said this bewildered Mrs. Stornway.

‘Of course they will always come, dearest Alice,’ she ventured. ‘You are our chief place of pilgrimage.’

But she had taken the wrong tack. Mrs. Marling seemed able to read what was in her mind.

‘Oh, believe me I am quite démodée,’ she said, more to the needlework than to her friend. ‘And do you know, I like it? I hear of Mrs. Peets giving parties; Mrs. Pepperthwaite has At Homes; you, yourself, are organizing a garden fête, they tell me, and no doubt Mr. Blandfoot will soon be giving a ball. And here I sit, quite happy to be out of it all.’

‘Everyone has missed you so much,’ Mrs. Stornway murmured.

‘How nice of you to say that! I have missed you, dear Eva, more than once: but the others——! No. I am really meant for solitude. Do you like my picture?’ she went on, presenting to her friend’s view a remarkable seascape. In a violet sea a man of war of the Nelson period, all square lines and portholes, had heeled over away from the spectator, and was sinking with all sail set. ‘It’s an emblem of my life, dearest Eva,’ she continued. ‘Do you think it would be considered more of a masterpiece if I left it unfinished? Or better still, I might hide it away and just talk about it, and then I should make quite a name for myself, like your Mr.—Mr.——’

‘Blandfoot,’ put in Mrs. Stornway eagerly.

‘Like him,’ said Mrs. Marling, disdaining to repeat the name. ‘Have you been seeing a lot of him, my dear?’

Mrs. Stornway would only admit to having seen him once or twice. Like most people, she could not tell a disagreeable truth to Mrs. Marling. ‘But to-morrow I and one or two others thought of going in about tea-time to help him hang his pictures. Poor fellow, he is very helpless, like all men, and has no one in the house to lend a hand.’

‘I suppose he invited you,’ Mrs. Marling suddenly remarked.

‘We sort of decided it between us,’ said Mrs. Stornway hastily. ‘And, of course,’ she added, taking a run at it, and adopting the slightly self-conscious air that everyone who talked to Mrs. Marling sooner or later fell into—‘we hope to be shown the picture.’

‘What picture?’ inquired Mrs. Marling.

‘Why, the one everybody is talking about,’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway. ‘You mentioned it yourself a moment ago.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘I don’t think that exists. Oh, no. It’s just an idea that people have got into their heads. But I do pity you, my dear, heaving aloft those large photographic reproductions of the Blandfoot family portraits. I shall think of you, as I sit here listening to poor Mr. Hesketh. He does tire me.’

‘Hesketh!’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway in awed tones. ‘Not the Hesketh, the novelist? Is he coming to stay with you?’

‘He is already here,’ said Mrs. Marling, ‘only as I wanted the pleasure of talking to you alone I sent him out for a walk. And now,’ she went on briskly, relishing the visible pang of disappointment that crossed her visitor’s face, let us have some tea. But don’t forget to come and tell me what the picture is like, who painted it, and what it is worth.’