On his other side sat a very different person--the sweet-faced lady,
whose boy of fourteen sitting opposite kept up with her through dinner a
shy telegraphy of eye and smile. They were evidently alone in the world,
and everything to each other. She was a widow--a Mrs. Edward Manisty,
whose husband, a brilliant but selfish man of letters, had died some four
years before this date. His wife had never found out that he was selfish;
her love had haloed him; though she had plenty of character of her own.
She herself was an American, a New Englander by birth, carrying with her
still the perfume of a quiet life begun among the hills of Vermont, and
in sight of the Adirondacks; a life fundamentally Puritan and based on
Puritan ideals; yet softened and expanded by the modern forces of art,
travel, and books. Lucy Manisty had attracted her husband, when he, a
weary cosmopolitan, had met her first in Rome, by just this touch of
something austerely sweet, like the scent of lavender or dewy grass; and
she had it still--mingled with a kind humour--in her middle years, which
were so lonely but for her boy. She and Victoria Tatham had made friends
on the warm soil of Italy, and through a third person, a rare and
charming woman, whose death had first made them really known to each
other.
"I never saw anything so attractive!" Mrs. Manisty was murmuring in
Tatham's ear.
He followed the direction of her eyes, and his fair skin reddened.
"She is very pretty, isn't she?"
"Very--like a Verrocchio angel--who has been to college! She is an
artist?"
"She paints.
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