"If that's a beginning of interest in her I take note of it." The two stood there face to face; she settled her mantilla, looking down at it as she did so.

"You're looking very well," Osmond repeated still less relevantly than before.

"You have some idea.

You're never so well as when you've got an idea; they're always becoming to you." In the manner and tone of these two persons, on first meeting at any juncture, and especially when they met in the presence of others, was something indirect and circumspect, as if they had approached each other obliquely and addressed each other by implication.

The effect of each appeared to be to intensify to an appreciable degree the self-consciousness of the other.