CHAPTER V.––––––––
WHEN I SPOKE TO GEORGE Corvick of the caution I had received he made me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen’s ardent response was in itself a pledge of discretion. The question would now absorb them and would offer them a pastime too precious to be shared with the crowd. They appeared to have caught instinctively at Vereker’s high idea of enjoyment. Their intellectual pride, however, was not such as to make them indifferent to any further light I might throw on the affair they had in hand. They were indeed of the “artistic temperament,” and I was freshly struck with my colleague’s power to excite himself over a question of art. He’d call it letters, he’d call it life, but it was all one thin
