To all seeming, life presented itself dimly to her sage mind as something in the nature of a kaleidoscope, and you acquiesced in its changes. Sometimes the squares fell into a bright picture, sometimes into a dull one. You took them as they came; and that was all there was to it. That at any rate was the impression the Honorable John Ruffin derived from her answers to the questions he put to her twice or thrice when curiosity came on him to discover what lay behind that serene angel mask.
He expressed his impression in the pregnant words: "Mrs. Bride, you are a philosopher."
Hilary Vance, Mr. James and Madam Plehve, her dancing-mistress, sometimes saw another Pollyooly. She devoted herself to her dancing in the careful, painstaking fashion in which she grilled the bacon of the Honorable John Ruffin, or tended the Lump. But it was a very different matter; she loved it. Sometimes to dance was something very like an intoxication to her. Once every week she took Lump to tea with Hilary Vance and Mr. James at the studio in Chelsea; and she always danced for them that they might see what progress in the art she was making.
