In moments when she hoped to know the Cardiffs well she had pictured herself doing little graceful acts of politeness toward this paternal person--acts connected with his spectacles, his _Athenian_, his foot-stool But apparently she had to meet a knight and not a pawn.
She was hardly aware of taking counsel with herself; and the way she abandoned her hesitations, and what Janet was inwardly calling her Burne-Jonesisms, had all the effect of an access of unconsciousness.

Janet Cardiff watched it with delight.

"But why," she asked herself in wonder, "should she have been so affected--if it was affectation--with _me ?_" She would decide whether it was or was not afterward, she thought.

Meanwhile she was glad her father had thought of saying something nice about the art criticism in the _Decade_; he was putting it so much better than she could, and it would do for both of them.
"You paint yourself, I fancy ?" Mr.Cardiff was saying lightly.

There was no answer for an instant, or perhaps three.