Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/104

 be applauded when we play well—and especially when we don't."

"If there is one subject in the world," I said, veering a point, "about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, and what they really like."

"That's quite true," she lilted.

"But I knew a lady once—"

"Still another lady?"

"A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever 'the idea of her life' came into my 'study of imagination', I invariably saw her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself."

"Well it is, isn't it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it right? It is in the setting—isn't it—that one has one's opportunity to express what you call the self. It is in one's husband, children, friends, and one's home and habits and things and so on."

"Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the picture. She always seemed to frame."

"What an attitudinizer she must have been!"

"She was not. It was only, I think, that she