The little she knew she had learned from books or from her
companionship with Captain Dane that first summer after Clive had gone
abroad. And there was nothing orthodox, nothing pedantic, nothing
simulated or artificial in her likes or dislikes, her preferences or
her indifference.

Yet, somehow, even without knowing, the girl instinctively gravitated
toward all things good.

In modern art--with the exception of a few painters--she found little
to attract her; but the magnificence of the great Venetians, the
sombre splendour of the great Spaniards, the nobility of the great
English and Dutch masters held her with a spell forever new. And, as
for the exquisite, naively self-conscious works of Greuze, Lancret,
Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, and Nattier, she adored them with all the
fresh and natural appetite of a capacity for visual pleasure unjaded.

He recognised Raphael with respect and pleasure when authority
reassured him it was Raphael. Also he probably knew more about the
history of art than did she. Otherwise it was Athalie who led,
instinctively, toward what gallery and library held as their best.

Her favourite lingering places were amid the immortal Chinese
porcelains and the masterpieces of the Renaissance. And thither she
frequently beguiled Clive,--not that he required any persuading to
follow this young and lovely creature who ranged the full boundaries
of her environment, living to the full life as it had been allotted
her.

Wholesome with that charming and rounded slenderness of perfect health
there yet seemed no limit to her capacity for the enjoyment of all
things for which an appetite exists--pleasures, mental or physical--it
did not seem to matter.