“About such relations?” He looked agreeably surprised. “You think we make them larger?—or subtler?”

Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, at the fire, but at the ceiling. “I don’t know what I think.”

“It’s not that she doesn’t know,” Mrs. Dyott remarked. “It’s only that she doesn’t say.”

But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a moment he watched Maud. “It sticks out of you, you know, that you’ve yourself written something. Haven’t you—and published? I’ve a notion I could read you.”

“When I do publish,” she said without moving, “you’ll be the last one I shall tell. I have,” she went on, “a lovely subject, but it would take an amount of treatment—!”

“Tell us then at least what it is.”

At this she again met his eyes. “Oh, to tell it would be to express it, and that’s just what I can’t do. What I meant to say just now,” she added, “was that the French, to my sense, give us only again and again, forever and ever, the same couple. There they are once more, as one has had them to satiety, in that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly again find them in the blue.”

“Then why do you keep reading about them?” Mrs. Dyott demanded.

Maud hesitated. “I don’t!” she sighed. “At all events, I shan’t any more. I give it up.”

“You’ve been looking for something, I judge,” said Colonel Voyt, “that you’re not likely to find. It doesn’t exist.”

“What is it?” Mrs. Dyott inquired.

“I never look,” Maud remarked, “for anything but an interest.”

“Naturally. But your interest,” Voyt replied, “is in something different from life.”

“Ah, not a bit! I love life—in art, though I hate it anywhere else. It’s the poverty of the life those people show, and the awful bounders, of both sexes, that they represent.”

“Oh, now we have you!” her interlocutor laughed. “To me, when all’s said and done, they seem to be—as near as art can come—in the truth of the truth. It can only take what life gives it, though it certainly may be a pity that that isn’t better. Your complaint of their monotony is a complaint of their conditions. When you say we get always the same couple what do you mean but that we get always the same passion? Of course we do!” Voyt declared. “If what you’re looking for is another, that’s what you won’t anywhere find.”

Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott seemed to wait. “Well, I suppose I’m looking, more than anything else, for a decent woman.”

“Oh, then, you mustn’t look for her in pictures of passion. That’s not her element nor her whereabouts.”

Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection. “Doesn’t it depend on what you mean by passion?”

“I think one can mean only one thing: the enemy to behavior.”

“Oh, I can imagine passions that are, on the contrary, friends to it.”

Her interlocutor thought. “Doesn’t it depend perhaps on what you mean by behavior?”