She went on amusing Straker all evening, and after dinner she made him take her into the conservatory.

The conservatory at Amberley is built out fanwise from the big west drawing-room on to the southwest corner of the terrace; it is furnished as a convenient lounge, and you sit there drinking coffee, and smoking, and admiring Brocklebank\'s roses, which are the glory of Amberley. And all among Brocklebank\'s roses they came upon Furnival and Mrs. Viveash.

Among the roses she shimmered and flushed in a gown of rose and silver. Among the roses she was lovely, sitting there with Furnival. And Straker saw that Miss Tarrant was aware of the loveliness of Mrs. Viveash, and that her instinct woke in her.

She advanced, trailing behind her the long, diaphanous web of her black gown. When she was well within the range of Furnival\'s sensations she paused to smell a rose, bending her body backward and sideward so [Pg 119] that she showed to perfection the deep curved lines that swept from her shoulders to her breasts, and from her breasts downward to her hips. A large diamond star hung as by an invisible thread upon her neck: it pointed downward to the hollow of her breasts. There was no beauty that she had that was not somehow pointed to, insisted on, held forever under poor Furnival\'s excited eyes.

But in a black gown, among roses, she showed disadvantageously her dead whiteness and her morbid rose. She was aware of that. Mrs. Viveash, glowing among the roses, had made her aware.

"Why did we ever come here?" she inquired of Straker. "These roses are horribly unbecoming to me."

"Nothing is unbecoming to you, and you jolly well know it," said Furnival.

She ignored it.

"Just look at their complexions. They oughtn\'t to be allowed about."

She picked one and laid it against the dead-white hollow of her breast, and curled her neck to look at it there; then she shook her head at it in disapproval, took it away, and held it out an inch from Furnival\'s face. He recoiled slightly.

"It won\'t bite," she murmured. "It\'ll let you stroke it." She stroked it herself, with fingers drawn tenderly, caressingly, over petals smooth and cool as their own skin. "I believe it can feel. I believe it likes it."

Furnival groaned. Straker heard him; so did Mrs. Viveash. She stirred in her seat, causing a spray of Dorothy Perkins to shake as if it indeed felt and shared her terror. Miss Tarrant turned from Furnival and laid her rose on Mrs. Viveash\'s shoulder, where it did no wrong. [Pg 120]

"It\'s yours," she said; "or a part of you."

Mrs. Viveash looked up at Furnival, and her face flickered for a moment. Furnival did not see her face; he was staring at Miss Tarrant.

"Ah," he cried, "how perfect! You and I\'ll have to dry up, Straker, unless you can go one better than that."

"I shouldn\'t dream," said Straker, "of trying to beat Miss Tarrant at her own game."

"If you know what it is. I\'m hanged if I do."

Furnival was tearing from its tree a Caroline Testout, one of Brocklebank\'s choicest blooms. Miss Tarrant cried out:

"Oh, stop him, somebody. They\'re Mr. Brocklebank\'s roses."

"They ain\'t a part of Brockles," Furnival replied.

He approached her with Brocklebank\'s Caroline Testout, and, with his own dangerous, his outrageous fervor, "You say it f-f-feels," he stammered. "It\'s what you want, then—something t-tender and living about you. Not that s-scin-t-tillating thing you\'ve got there. It tires me to look at it." He closed his eyes.

"You needn\'t look at it," she said.

"I can\'t help it. It\'s ............