initial commit of ebook 34252HEADmain

1 files changed, 6644 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/34252.txt b/34252.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23eac6a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/34252.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6644 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Vanitas, by Vernon Lee
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Vanitas
+       Polite Stories (Lady Tal--A Worldly Woman--The Legend of Madame Krasinska)
+
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2010  [eBook #34252]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANITAS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Delphine Lettau and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net)
+
+
+
+The Crown Copyright Series
+1892
+
+VANITAS
+
+Polite Stories
+
+by
+
+VERNON LEE,
+
+Author of "Hauntings," Etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+William Heinemann
+1892
+
+[All rights reserved]
+
+
+
+
+_ALLA BARONESSA E. FRENCH-CINI._
+
+_PISTOIA PER IGNO._
+
+
+
+
+    MY DEAR ELENA,
+
+    We had a conversation once, walking on your terrace, with the
+    wind-rippled olives above and the quietly nodding cypress tufts
+    below--about such writings as you chose to compare with carved
+    cherry-stones. We disagreed, for it seemed to me that the world
+    needed cherry-stone necklaces as much as anything else; and that
+    the only pity was that most of its inhabitants could not afford
+    such toys, and the rest despised them because they were made of
+    such very cheap material. Still, lest you should wonder at my
+    sending such things to you, I write to declare that my three
+    little tales, whatever they be, are not carved cherry-stones.
+
+    For round these sketches of frivolous women, there have gathered
+    some of the least frivolous thoughts, heaven knows, that have ever
+    come into my head; or rather, such thoughts have condensed and
+    taken body in these stories. Indeed, how can one look from outside
+    on the great waste of precious things, delicate discernment,
+    quick feeling and sometimes stoical fortitude, involved in
+    frivolous life, without a sense of sadness and indignation? Or what
+    satisfaction could its portrayal afford, save for the chance that
+    such pictures might mirror some astonished and abashed creature;
+    or show to men and women who toil and think that idleness, and
+    callousness, and much that must seem to them sheer wickedness, is
+    less a fault than a misfortune. For surely it is a misfortune not
+    merely to waste the nobler qualities one has, but to have little
+    inkling of the sense of brotherhood and duty which changes one,
+    from a blind dweller in caves, to an inmate of the real world of
+    storms and sunshine and serene night and exhilarating morning.
+    And, if miracles were still wrought nowadays, as in those times
+    when great sinners (as in Calderon's play) were warned by plucking
+    the hood off their own dead face, there would have been no waste
+    of the supernatural in teaching my Madame Krasinska that poor
+    crazy paupers and herself were after all exchangeable quantities.
+
+    Of my three frivolous women, another performed the miracle
+    herself, and abandoned freely the service of the great Goddess
+    Vanitas. While the third ... and there is the utter pity of the
+    thing, that frivolous living means not merely waste, but in many
+    cases martyrdom.
+
+    That fact, though it had come more than once before my eyes, would
+    perhaps never have been clear to my mind, but for our long talks
+    together about what people are and might be. A certain indignation
+    verging on hatred might have made these stories of mine utterly
+    false and useless, but for the love of all creatures who may
+    suffer with which you lit up the subject. And for this reason the
+    proof sheets of my little book must go first to that old bishop's
+    villa on the lowest Apennine spur, where the chestnuts are
+    dropping, with a sound of rustling silk, on to the sere leaves
+    below, and the autumn rain storms are rushing by, veiling the
+    plain with inky crape, blotting out that distant white shimmer,
+    which, in the sunlight, was Florence a moment ago.
+                                                          VERNON LEE.
+     CHELSEA, _October_, 1891.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+                                     PAGE
+
+  LADY TAL                              7
+
+  A WORLDLY WOMAN                     123
+
+  THE LEGEND OF MADAME KRASINSKA      225
+
+
+
+
+LADY TAL.
+
+
+The church of the Salute, with its cupolas and volutes, stared in at
+the long windows, white, luminous, spectral. A white carpet of moonlight
+stretched to where they were sitting, with only one lamp lit, for fear
+of mosquitoes. All the remoter parts of the vast drawing-room were deep
+in gloom; you were somehow conscious of the paintings and stuccos of
+the walls and vaulted ceilings without seeing them. From the canal rose
+plash of oar, gondolier's cry, and distant guitar twang and quaver
+of song; and from the balconies came a murmur of voices and women's
+laughter. The heavy scent of some flower, vague, white, southern,
+mingled with the cigarette smoke in that hot evening air, which seemed,
+by contrast to the Venetian day, almost cool.
+
+As Jervase Marion lolled back (that lolling of his always struck one
+as out of keeping with his well-adjusted speech, his precise mind, the
+something conventional about him) on the ottoman in the shadow, he was
+conscious of a queer feeling, as if, instead of having arrived from
+London only two hours ago, he had never ceased to be here at Venice,
+and under Miss Vanderwerf's hospitable stuccoed roof. All those years
+of work, of success, of experience (or was it not rather of study?)
+of others, bringing with them a certain heaviness, baldness, and
+scepticism, had become almost a dream, and this present moment and the
+similar moment twelve years ago remaining as the only reality. Except
+his hostess, whose round, unchangeable face, the face of a world-wise,
+kind but somewhat frivolous baby, was lit up faintly by the regular
+puffs of her cigarette, all the people in the room were strangers to
+Marion: yet he knew them so well, he had known them so long.
+
+There was the old peeress, her head tied up in a white pocket-handkerchief,
+and lolling from side to side with narcoticised benevolence, who, as it
+was getting on towards other people's bedtime, was gradually beginning
+to wake up from the day's slumber, and to murmur eighteenth-century
+witticisms and Blessingtonian anecdotes. There was the American
+Senator, seated with postage-stamp profile and the attitude of a bronze
+statesman, against the moonlight, one hand in his waistcoat, the other
+incessantly raised to his ear as in a stately "Beg pardon?" There
+was the depressed Venetian naval officer who always made the little
+joke about not being ill when offered tea; the Roumanian Princess who
+cultivated the reputation of saying spiteful things cleverly, and wore
+all her pearls for fear of their tarnishing; the English cosmopolitan
+who was one day on the Bosphorus and the next in Bond Street, and
+was wise about singing and acting; the well turned out, subdued,
+Parisian-American aesthete talking with an English accent about modern
+pictures and ladies' dresses; and the awkward, enthusiastic English
+aesthete, who considered Ruskin a ranter and creaked over the marble
+floors with dusty, seven-mile boots. There was a solitary spinster fresh
+from higher efforts of some sort, unconscious that no one in Venice
+appreciated her classic profile, and that everyone in Venice stared at
+her mediaeval dress and collar of coins from the British Museum. There
+was the usual bevy of tight-waisted Anglo-Italian girls ready to play
+the guitar and sing, and the usual supply of shy, young artists from the
+three-franc pensions, wandering round the room, candle in hand, with
+the niece of the house, looking with shy intentness at every picture
+and sketch and bronze statuette and china bowl and lacquer box.
+
+The smoke of the cigarettes mingled with the heavy scent of the flowers;
+the plash of oar and snatch of song rose from the canal; the murmur
+and laughter entered from the balcony. The old peeress lolled out her
+Blessingtonian anecdotes; the Senator raised his hand to his ear and
+said "Beg pardon?" the Roumanian Princess laughed shrilly at her own
+malignant sayings; the hostess's face was periodically illumined by her
+cigarette and the hostess's voice periodically burst into a childlike:
+"Why, you don't mean it!" The young men and women flirted in undertones
+about Symonds, Whistler, Tolstoy, and the way of rowing gondolas, with
+an occasional chord struck on the piano, an occasional string twanged on
+the guitar. The Salute, with its cupolas and volutes, loomed spectral in
+at the windows; the moonlight spread in a soft, shining carpet to their
+feet.
+
+Jervase Marion knew it all so well, so well, this half-fashionable,
+half-artistic Anglo-American idleness of Venice, with its poetic setting
+and its prosaic reality. He would have known it, he felt, intimately,
+even if he had never seen it before; known it so as to be able to make
+each of these people say in print what they did really say. There is
+something in being a psychological novelist, and something in being a
+cosmopolitan American, something in being an inmate of the world of
+Henry James and a kind of Henry James, of a lesser magnitude, yourself:
+one has the pleasure of understanding so much, one loses the pleasure
+of misunderstanding so much more.
+
+A singing boat came under the windows of Palazzo Bragadin, and as much
+of the company as could, squeezed on to the cushioned gothic balconies,
+much to the annoyance of such as were flirting outside, and to the
+satisfaction of such as were flirting within. Marion--who, much to poor
+Miss Vanderwerf's disgust, had asked to be introduced to no one as yet,
+but to be allowed to realise that evening, as he daintily put it, that
+Venice was the same and he a good bit changed--Marion leaned upon the
+parapet of a comparatively empty balcony and looked down at the canal.
+The moonbeams were weaving a strange, intricate pattern, like some
+old Persian tissue, in the dark water; further off the yellow and red
+lanterns of the singing boat were surrounded by black gondolas, each
+with its crimson, unsteady prow-light; and beyond, mysterious in the
+moonlight, rose the tower and cupola of St. George, the rigging of
+ships, and stretched a shimmering band of lagoon.
+
+He had come to give himself a complete holiday here, after the grind of
+furnishing a three-volume novel for Blackwood (Why did he write so much?
+he asked himself; he had enough of his own, and to spare, for a dainty
+but frugal bachelor); and already vague notions of new stories began
+to arrive in his mind. He determined to make a note of them and dismiss
+them for the time. He had determined to be idle; and he was a very
+methodical man, valuing above everything (even above his consciousness
+of being a man of the world) his steady health, steady, slightly depressed
+spirits, and steady, monotonous, but not unmanly nor unenjoyable routine
+of existence.
+
+Jervase Marion was thinking of this, and the necessity of giving himself
+a complete rest, not letting himself be dragged off into new studies of
+mankind and womankind; and listening, at the same time, half-unconsciously,
+to the scraps of conversation which came from the other little
+balconies, where a lot of heads were grouped, dark in the moonlight.
+
+"I do hope it will turn out well--at least not too utterly awful," said
+the languid voice of a young English manufacturer's heir, reported to
+live exclusively off bread and butter and sardines, and to have no
+further desires in the world save those of the amiable people who
+condescended to shoot on his moors, yacht in his yachts, and generally
+devour his millions, "it's ever so long since I've been wanting a
+sideboard. It's rather hard lines for a poor fellow to be unable to
+find a sideboard ready made, isn't it? And I have my doubts about it
+even now."
+
+There was a faint sarcastic tinge in the languid voice; the eater of
+bread and butter occasionally felt vague amusement at his own ineptness.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear boy," answered the cosmopolitan, who knew all about
+acting and singing; "it's sure to be beautiful. Only you must _not_ let
+them put on that rococo cornice, quite out of character, my dear boy."
+
+"A real rococo cornice is a precious lot better, I guess, than a beastly
+imitation Renaissance frieze cut with an oyster knife," put in a gruff
+New York voice. "That's my view, leastways."
+
+"I think Mr. Clarence had best have it made in slices, and each
+of you gentlemen design him a slice--that's what's called original
+nowadays--_c'est notre facon d'entendre l'art aujourd'hui_," said the
+Roumanian Princess.
+
+A little feeble laugh proceeded from Mr. Clarence. "Oh," he said, "I
+shouldn't mind that at all. I'm not afraid of my friends. I'm afraid of
+myself, of my fickleness and weak-mindedness. At this rate I shall never
+have a sideboard at all, I fear."
+
+"There's a very good one, with three drawers and knobs, and a ticket
+'garantito vero noce a lire 45,' in a joiner's shop at San Vio, which I
+pass every morning. You'd much better have that, Mr. Clarence. And it
+would be a new departure in art and taste, you know."
+
+The voice was a woman's; a little masculine, and the more so for a
+certain falsetto pitch. It struck Marion by its resolution, a sort
+of highbred bullying and a little hardness about it.
+
+"Come, don't be cruel to poor Clarence, Tal darling," cried Miss
+Vanderwerf, with her kind, infantine laugh.
+
+"Why, what have I been saying, my dear thing?" asked the voice, with
+mock humility; "I only want to help the poor man in his difficulties."
+
+"By the way, Lady Tal, will you allow me to take you to Rietti's one
+day?" added an aesthetic young American, with a shadowy Boston accent;
+"he has some things you ought really to see, some quite good tapestries,
+a capital Gubbio vase. And he has a carved nigger really by Brustolon,
+which you ought to get for your red room at Rome. He'd look superb. The
+head's restored and one of the legs, so Rietti'd let him go for very
+little. He really is an awfully jolly bit of carving--and in that red
+room of yours----"
+
+"Thanks, Julian. I don't think I seem to care much about him. The fact
+is, I have to see such a lot of ugly white men in my drawing-room, I
+feel I really couldn't stand an ugly black one into the bargain."
+
+Here Miss Vanderwerf, despite her solemn promise, insisted on
+introducing Jervase Marion to a lady of high literary tastes, who
+proceeded forthwith to congratulate him as the author of a novel by
+Randolph Tomkins, whom he abominated most of all living writers.
+
+Presently there was a stir in the company, those of the balcony came
+trooping into the drawing-room, four or five young men and girls,
+surrounding a tall woman in a black walking-dress; people dropped in to
+these open evenings of Mrs. Vanderwerf's from their row on the lagoon or
+stroll at St. Mark's.
+
+Miss Vanderwerf jumped up.
+
+"You aren't surely going yet, dearest?" she cried effusively. "My
+darling child, it isn't half-past ten yet."
+
+"I must go; poor Gerty's in bed with a cold, and I must go and look
+after her."
+
+"Bother Gerty!" ejaculated one of the well turned out aesthetic young
+men.
+
+The tall young woman gave him what Marion noted as a shutting-up look.
+
+"Learn to respect my belongings," she answered, "I must really go back
+to my cousin."
+
+Jervase Marion had immediately identified her as the owner of that
+rather masculine voice with the falsetto tone; and apart from the voice,
+he would have identified her as the lady who had bullied the poor young
+man in distress about his sideboard. She was very tall, straight, and
+strongly built, the sort of woman whom you instinctively think of as
+dazzlingly fine in a ball frock; but at the same time active and
+stalwart, suggestive of long rides and drives and walks. She had
+handsome aquiline features, just a trifle wooden in their statuesque
+fineness, abundant fair hair, and a complexion, pure pink and white,
+which told of superb health. Marion knew the type well. It was one
+which, despite all the years he had lived in England, made him feel
+American, impressing him as something almost exotic. This great
+strength, size, cleanness of outline and complexion, this look of
+carefully selected breed, of carefully fostered health, was to him
+the perfect flower of the aristocratic civilization of England. There
+were more beautiful types, certainly, and, intellectually, higher
+ones (his experience was that such women were shrewd, practical, and
+quite deficient in soul), but there was no type more well-defined and
+striking, in his eyes. This woman did not seem an individual at all.
+
+"I must go," insisted the tall lady, despite the prayers of her hostess
+and the assembled guests. "I really can't leave that poor creature alone
+a minute longer."
+
+"Order the gondola, Kennedy; call Titta, please," cried Miss Vanderwerf
+to one of the many youths whom the kindly old maid ordered about with
+motherly familiarity.
+
+"Mayn't I have the honour of offering mine?" piped the young man.
+
+"Thanks, it isn't worth while. I shall walk." Here came a chorus
+of protestations, following the tall young woman into the outer
+drawing-room, through the hall, to the head of the great flight of
+open-air stairs.
+
+Marion had mechanically followed the noisy, squabbling, laughing crew.
+The departure of this lady suggested to him that he would slip away to
+his inn.
+
+"Do let me have the pleasure of accompanying you," cried one young man
+after another.
+
+"_Do_ take Clarence or Kennedy or Piccinillo, darling," implored Mrs.
+Vanderwerf. "You can't really walk home alone."
+
+"It's not three steps from here," answered the tall one. "And I'm sure
+it's much more proper for a matron of ever so many years standing to go
+home alone than accompanied by a lot of fascinating young creatures."
+
+"But, dear, you really don't know Venice; suppose you were spoken to!
+Just think."
+
+"Well, beloved friend, I know enough Italian to be able to answer."
+
+The tall lady raised one beautifully pencilled eyebrow, slightly, with a
+contemptuous little look. "Besides, I'm big enough to defend myself, and
+see, here's an umbrella with a silver knob, or what passes for such in
+these degenerate days. Nobody will come near that."
+
+And she took the weapon from a rack in the hall, where the big
+seventeenth-century lamp flickered on the portraits of doges in crimson
+and senators in ermine.
+
+"As you like, dearest. I know that wilful must have her own way," sighed
+Miss Vanderwerf, rising on tiptoe and kissing her on both cheeks.
+
+"Mayn't I really accompany you?" repeated the various young men.
+
+She shook her head, with the tall, pointed hat on it.
+
+"No, you mayn't; good-night, dear friends," and she brandished her
+umbrella over her head and descended the stairs, which went sheer down
+into the moonlit yard. The young men bowed. One, with the air of a
+devotee in St. Mark's, kissed her hand at the bottom of the flight
+of steps, while the gondolier unlocked the gate. They could see him
+standing in the moonlight and hear him say earnestly:
+
+"I leave for Paris to-morrow; good-night."
+
+She did not answer him, but making a gesture with her umbrella to those
+above, she cried: "Good-night."
+
+"Good-night," answered the chorus above the stairs, watching the tall
+figure pass beneath the gate and into the moonlit square.
+
+"Well now," said Miss Vanderwerf, settling herself on her ottoman again,
+and fanning herself after her exertions in the drawing-room, "there is
+no denying that she's a strange creature, dear thing."
+
+"A fine figure-head cut out of oak, with a good, solid, wooden heart,"
+said the Roumanian Princess.
+
+"No, no," exclaimed the lady of the house. "She's just as good as
+gold,--poor Lady Tal!"
+
+
+II.
+
+"Tal?" asked Marion.
+
+"Tal. Her name's Atalanta, Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw--but everyone calls
+her Tal--Lady Tal. She's the daughter of Lord Ossian, you know."
+
+"And who is or was Walkenshaw?--is, I presume, otherwise she'd have
+married somebody else by this time."
+
+"Poor Tal!" mused Miss Vanderwerf. "I'm sure she would have no
+difficulty in finding another husband to make up for that fearful old
+Walkenshaw creature. But she's in a very sad position for so young a
+creature, poor girl."
+
+"Ah!" ejaculated Marion, familiar with ladies thus to be commiserated,
+and remembering his friend's passion for romance, unquenchable by many
+seriocomic disenchantments, "separated from her husband--that sort of
+thing! I thought so."
+
+"Now, why did you think that, you horrid creature?" asked his hostess
+eagerly. "Well, now, there's no saying that you're not _real_
+psychological, Jervase. Now _do_ tell what made you think of such a
+thing."
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure," answered Marion, suppressing a yawn. He hated
+people who pried into his novelist consciousness, all the more so that
+he couldn't in the least explain its contents. "Something about her--or
+nothing about her--a mere guess, a stupid random shot that happens to
+have hit right."
+
+"Why, that's just the thing, that you haven't hit quite right. That is,
+it's right in one way, and wrong in another. Oh, my! how difficult it is
+just to explain, when one isn't a clever creature like you? Well, Lady
+Tal isn't separated from her husband, but it's just the same as if she
+were----"
+
+"I see. Mad? Poor thing!" exclaimed Marion with that air of concern
+which always left you in doubt whether it was utterly conventional, or
+might not contain a grain of sympathy after all.
+
+"No, he's not mad. He's dead--been dead ever so long. She's one and
+thirty, you know--doesn't look it, does she?--and was married at
+eighteen. But she can't marry again, for all that, because if she
+marries all his money goes elsewhere, and she's not a penny to bless
+herself with."
+
+"Ah--and why didn't she have proper settlements made?" asked Marion.
+
+"That's just it. Because old Walkenshaw, who was a beast--just a
+beast--had a prejudice against settlements, and said he'd do much better
+for his wife than that--leave her everything, if only they didn't plague
+him. And then, when the old wretch died, after they'd been married a
+year or so, it turned out that he had left her everything, but only on
+condition of her not marrying again. If she did, it would all go to the
+next of kin. He hated the next of kin, too, they say, and wanted to keep
+the money away from him as long as possible, horrid old wretch! So there
+poor Tal is a widow, but unable to marry again."
+
+"Dear me!" ejaculated Marion, looking at the patterns which the
+moonlight, falling between the gothic balcony balustrade, was making on
+the shining marble floor; and reflecting upon the neat way in which the
+late Walkenshaw had repaid his wife for marrying him for his money; for
+of course she had married him for his money. Marion was not a stoic, or
+a cynic, or a philosopher of any kind. He fully accepted the fact that
+the daughters of Scotch lords should marry for money, he even hated
+all sorts of sentimental twaddle about human dignity. But he rather
+sympathised with this old Walkenshaw, whoever Walkenshaw might have
+been, who had just served a mercenary young lady as was right.
+
+"I don't see that it's so hard, aunt," said Miss Vanderwerf's niece, who
+was deeply in love with Bill Nettle, a penniless etcher. "Lady Tal might
+marry again if she'd learn to do without all that money."
+
+"If she would be satisfied with only a little less," interrupted the
+sharp-featured Parisian-American whom Mrs. Vanderwerf wanted for a
+nephew-in-law. "Why, there are dozens of men with plenty of money who
+have been wanting to marry her. There was Sir Titus Farrinder, only last
+year. He mayn't have had as much as old Walkenshaw, but he had a jolly
+bit of money, certainly."
+
+"Besides, after all," put in the millionaire in distraction about the
+sideboard, "why should Lady Tal want to marry again? She's got a lovely
+house at Rome."
+
+"Oh, come, come, Clarence!" interrupted Kennedy horrified; "why, it's
+nothing but Japanese leather paper and Chinese fans."
+
+"I don't know," said Clarence, crestfallen. "Perhaps it isn't lovely. I
+thought it _rather_ pretty--don't you really think it _rather_ nice,
+Miss Vanderwerf?"
+
+"Any house would be nice enough with such a splendid creature inside
+it," put in Marion. These sort of conversations always interested him;
+it was the best way of studying human nature.
+
+"Besides," remarked the Roumanian Princess, "Lady Tal may have had
+enough of the married state. And why indeed should a beautiful creature
+like that get married? She's got every one at her feet. It's much more
+amusing like that----"
+
+"Well, all the same, I _do_ think it's just terribly sad, to see a
+creature like that condemned to lead such a life, without anyone to
+care for or protect her, now poor Gerald Burne's dead."
+
+"Oh, her brother--her brother--do you suppose she cared for _him_?"
+asked the niece, pouring out the iced lemonade and Cyprus wine. She
+always rebelled against her aunt's romanticalness.
+
+"Gerald Burne!" said Marion, collecting his thoughts, and suddenly
+seeing in his mind a certain keen-featured face, a certain wide curl of
+blond hair, not seen for many a long year. "Gerald Burne! Do you mean an
+awfully handsome young Scotchman, who did something very distinguished
+in Afghanistan? You don't mean to say he was any relation of Lady
+Atalanta's? I never heard of his being dead, either. I thought he must
+be somewhere in India."
+
+"Gerald Burne was Lady Tal's half-brother--her mother had married a
+Colonel Burne before her marriage with Lord Ossian. He got a spear-wound
+or something out in Afghanistan," explained one of the company.
+
+"I thought it was his horse," interrupted another.
+
+"Anyhow," resumed Miss Vanderwerf, "poor Gerald was crippled for life--a
+sort of spinal disease, you know. That was just after old Sir Thomas
+Walkenshaw departed, so Tal and he lived together and went travelling
+from one place to another, consulting doctors, and that sort of thing,
+until they settled in Rome. And now poor Gerald is dead--he died two
+years ago--Tal's all alone in the world, for Lord Ossian's a wretched,
+tipsy, bankrupt old creature, and the other sisters are married. Gerald
+was just an angel, and you've no idea how devoted poor Tal was to
+him--he was just her life, I do believe."
+
+The young man called Ted looked contemptuously at his optimistic
+hostess.
+
+"Well," he said, "I don't know whether Lady Tal cared much for her
+brother while he was alive. My belief is she never cared a jackstraw
+for anyone. Anyway, if she _did_ care for him you must admit she didn't
+show it after his death. I never saw a woman look so utterly indifferent
+and heartless as when I saw her a month later. She made jokes, I
+remember, and asked me to take her to a curiosity shop. And she went
+to balls in London not a year afterwards."
+
+The niece nodded. "Exactly. I always thought it perfectly indecent. Of
+course Aunt says it's Tal's way of showing her grief, but it's a very
+funny one, anyhow."
+
+"I'm sure Lady Tal must regret her brother," said the Roumanian Princess.
+"Just think how convenient for a young widow to be able to say to all
+the men she likes: 'Oh, do come and see poor Gerald.'"
+
+"Well, well!" remarked Miss Vanderwerf. "Of course she did take her
+brother's death in a very unusual way. But still I maintain she's not
+heartless for all that."
+
+"Hasn't a pretty woman a right to be heartless, after all?" put in
+Marion.
+
+"Oh, I don't care a fig whether Lady Tal is heartless or not," answered
+Ted brusquely. "Heartlessness isn't a social offence. What I object to
+most in Lady Tal is her being so frightfully mean."
+
+"Mean?"
+
+"Why, yes; avaricious. With all those thousands, that woman manages to
+spend barely more than a few hundreds."
+
+"Well, but if she's got simple tastes?" suggested Marion.
+
+"She hasn't. No woman was ever further from it. And of course it's so
+evident what her game is! She just wants to feather her nest against a
+rainy day. She's putting by five-sixths of old Walkenshaw's money, so as
+to make herself a nice little _dot_, to marry someone else upon one of
+these days."
+
+"A judicious young lady!" observed Marion.
+
+"Well, really, Mr. Kennedy," exclaimed the Roumanian Princess, "you are
+ingenious and ingenuous! Do you suppose that our dear Tal is putting by
+money in order to marry some starving genius, to do love in a cottage
+with? Why, if she's not married yet, it's merely because she's not met a
+sufficient _parti_. She wants something very grand--a _Pezzo Grosso_, as
+they say here."
+
+"She couldn't marry as long as she had Gerald to look after," said Miss
+Vanderwerf, fanning herself in the moonlight. "She was too fond of
+Gerald."
+
+"She was afraid of Gerald, that's my belief, too," corrected the niece.
+"Those big creatures are always cowards. And Gerald hated the notion
+of her making another money marriage, though he seems to have arranged
+pretty well to live on old Walkenshaw's thousands."
+
+"Of course Gerald wanted to keep her all for himself; that was quite
+natural," said Miss Vanderwerf; "but I think that as long as he was
+alive she did not want anyone else. She thought only of him, poor
+creature----"
+
+"And of a score of ball and dinner-parties and a few hundred
+acquaintances," put in Ted, making rings with the smoke of his cigarette.
+
+"And now," said the Princess, "she's waiting to find her _Pezzo Grosso_.
+And she wants money because she knows that a _Pezzo Grosso_ will marry a
+penniless girl of eighteen, but won't marry a penniless woman of thirty;
+she must make up for being a little _passee_ by loving him for his own
+sake, and for that, she must have money."
+
+"For all that, poor Tal's very simple," wheezed the old peeress,
+apparently awakening from a narcotic slumber. "She always reminds me of
+an anecdote poor dear Palmerston used to tell----"
+
+"Anyhow," said Kennedy, "Lady Tal's a riddle, and I pity the man who
+tries to guess it. Good-night, dear Miss Vanderwerf--good-night, Miss
+Bessy. It's all settled about dining at the Lido, I hope. And you'll
+come, too, I hope, Mr. Marion."
+
+"I'll come with pleasure, particularly if you ask the enigmatic Lady
+Tal."
+
+"Much good it is to live in Venice," thought Jervase Marion, looking out
+of his window on to the canal, "if one spends two hours discussing a
+young woman six foot high looking out for a duke."
+
+
+III.
+
+Jervase Marion had registered three separate, well-defined, and solemn
+vows, which I recapitulate in the inverse order to their importance.
+The first was: Not to be enticed into paying calls during that month at
+Venice; the second, Not to drift into studying any individual character
+while on a holiday; and the third, a vow dating from more years back
+than he cared to think of, and resulting from infinite bitterness of
+spirit, Never to be entrapped, beguiled, or bullied into looking at the
+manuscript of an amateur novelist. And now he had not been in Venice ten
+days before he had broken each of these vows in succession; and broken
+them on behalf, too, of one and the same individual.
+
+The individual in question was Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw, or, as he had
+already got accustomed to call her, Lady Tal. He had called upon Lady
+Tal; he had begun studying Lady Tal; and now he was actually untying
+the string which fastened Lady Tal's first attempt at a novel.
+
+Why on earth had he done any of these things, much less all? Jervase
+Marion asked himself, leaving the folded parcel unopened on the large
+round table, covered with a black and red table-cloth, on which were
+neatly spread out his writing-case, blotter, inkstand, paper-cutter,
+sundry packets of envelopes, and boxes of cigarettes, two uncut
+_Athenaeums_, three dog-eared French novels (Marion secretly despised all
+English ones, and was for ever coveting that exquisite artistic sense,
+that admirable insincerity of the younger Frenchmen), a Baedeker, a
+Bradshaw, the photograph, done just before her death, of his mother in
+her picturesque, Puritan-looking widow's cap, and a little portfolio for
+unanswered letters, with flowers painted on it by his old friend, Biddy
+Lothrop.
+
+Marion gave the parcel, addressed in a large, quill-pen hand, a look of
+utter despair, and thrusting his hands ungracefully but desperately into
+the armhole of his alpaca writing-jacket, paced slowly up and down his
+darkened room on a side canal. He had chosen that room, rather than
+one on the Riva, thinking it would be less noisy. But it seemed to him
+now, in one of his nervous fits, as if all the noises of the world
+had concentrated on to that side canal to distract his brain, weaken
+his will, and generally render him incapable of coping with his own
+detestable weakness and Lady Tal's terrible determination. There was a
+plash of oar, a grind of keel, in that side canal, a cry of _Stali_ or
+_Preme_ from the gondoliers, only the more worrying for its comparative
+rareness. There was an exasperating blackbird who sang Garibaldi's hymn,
+in separate fragments, a few doors off, and an even more exasperating
+kitchen-maid, who sang the first bars of the umbrella trio of _Boccaccio_,
+without getting any further, while scouring her brasses at the window
+opposite, and rinsing out her saucepans, with a furtive splash into the
+canal. There was the bugle of the barracks, the bell of the parish
+church, the dog yelping on the boats of the Riva; everything in short
+which could madden a poor nervous novelist who has the crowning
+misfortune of looking delightfully placid.
+
+Why on earth, or rather how on earth, had he let himself in for all
+this? "All this" being the horrible business of Lady Atalanta, the
+visits to pay her, the manuscript to read, the judgment to pass, the
+advice to give, the lies to tell, all vaguely complicated with the song
+of that blackbird, the jar of that gondola keel, the jangle of those
+church bells. How on earth could he have been such a miserable worm?
+Marion asked himself, pacing up and down his large, bare room, mopping
+his head, and casting despairing glances at the mosquito curtains, the
+bulging yellow chest of drawers painted over with nosegays, the iron
+clothes-horse, the towel-stand, the large printed card setting forth in
+various tongues the necessity of travellers consigning all jewels and
+valuables to the secretary of the hotel at the Bureau.
+
+He could not, at present, understand in the very least why he had given
+that young woman any encouragement; for he must evidently have given her
+some encouragement before she could have gone to the length of asking so
+great a favour of a comparative stranger. And the odd part of it was,
+that when he looked into the past, that past of a few days only, it
+seemed as if, so far from his having encouraged Lady Tal, it had been
+Lady Tal who had encouraged him. He saw her, the more he looked, in the
+attitude of a woman granting a favour, not asking one. He couldn't even
+explain to himself how the matter of the novel had ever come up. He
+certainly couldn't remember having said: "I wish you would let me see
+your novel, Lady Tal," or "I should be curious to have a look at that
+novel of yours;" such a thing would have been too absurd on the part of
+a man who had always fled from manuscripts as from the plague. At the
+same time he seemed to have no recollection either of her having said
+the other thing, the more or less humble request for a reading. He
+recollected her saying: "Mind you tell me the exact truth--and don't be
+afraid of telling me if it's all disgusting rubbish." Indeed he could
+see something vaguely amused, mischievous, and a little contemptuous in
+the handsome, regular Scotch face; but that had been afterwards, after
+he had already settled the matter with her.
+
+It was the sense of having been got the better of, and in a wholly
+unintelligible way, which greatly aggravated the matter. For Marion did
+not feel the very faintest desire to do Lady Atalanta a service. He
+would not have minded so much if she had wheedled him into it,--no man
+thinks the worse of himself for having been wheedled by a handsome young
+woman of fashion,--or if she had been an appealing or pathetic creature,
+one of those who seem to suggest that this is just all that can be done
+for them, and that perhaps one may regret not having done it over their
+early grave.
+
+Lady Tal was not at all an appealing woman; she looked three times as
+strong, both in body and in mind, with her huge, strongly-knit frame,
+and clear, pink complexion, and eyes which evaded you, as himself and
+most of his acquaintances. And as to wheedling, how could she wheedle,
+this woman with her rather angular movements, brusque, sarcastic,
+bantering speech, and look of counting all the world as dust for an
+Ossian to trample underfoot? Moreover, Marion was distinctly aware of
+the fact that he rather disliked Lady Tal. It was not anything people
+said about her (although they seemed to say plenty), nor anything she
+said herself; it was a vague repulsion due to her dreadful strength, her
+appearance of never having felt anything, the hardness of those blue,
+bold eyes, the resolution of that well-cut, firmly closing mouth, the
+bantering tone of that voice, and the consequent impression which she
+left on him of being able to take care of herself to an extent almost
+dangerous to her fellow-creatures. Marion was not a sentimental
+novelist; his books turned mainly upon the little intrigues and
+struggles of the highly civilized portion of society, in which only the
+fittest have survived, by virtue of talon and beak. Yet he owned to
+himself, in the presence of Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw, or rather behind
+her back, that he did like human beings, and especially women, to have
+a soul; implying thereby that the lady in question affected him as being
+hampered by no such impediment to digestion, sleep, and worldly
+distinction.
+
+It was this want of soul which constituted the strength of Lady Tal.
+This negative quality had much more than the value of a positive one.
+And it was Lady Tal's want of soul which had, somehow, got the better of
+him, pushed him, bullied him, without any external manifestation, and by
+a mere hidden force, into accepting, or offering to read that
+manuscript.
+
+Jervase Marion was a methodical man, full of unformulated principles
+of existence. One of these consisted in always doing unpleasant duties
+at once, unless they were so unpleasant that he never did them at all.
+Accordingly, after a turn or two more up and down the room, and a minute
+or two lolling out of the window, and looking into that kitchen on the
+other side of the canal, with the bright saucepans in the background,
+and the pipkins with carnations and sweet basil on the sill, Marion cut
+the strings of the manuscript, rolled it backwards to make it lie flat,
+and with a melancholy little moan, began reading Lady Tal's novel.
+
+"Violet----" it began.
+
+"Violet! and her name's Violet too!" ejaculated Marion to himself.
+
+"Violet is seated in a low chair in the gloom in the big bow window at
+Kieldar--the big bow window encircled by ivy and constructed it is said
+by Earl Rufus before he went to the crusades and from which you command
+a magnificent prospect of the broad champaign country extending for many
+miles, all dotted with oaks and farmhouses and bounded on the horizon by
+the blue line of the hills of B----shire--the window in which she had
+sat so often and cried as a child when her father Lord Rufus had married
+again and brought home that handsome Jewish wife with the _fardee_ face
+and the exquisite dresses from Worth--Violet had taken refuge in that
+window in order to think over the events of the previous evening and
+that offer of marriage which her cousin Marmaduke had just made to
+her----"
+
+"Bless the woman!" exclaimed Marion, "what on earth is it all about?"
+And he registered the remark, to be used upon the earliest occasion in
+one of his own novels, that highly-connected and well-dressed young
+women of the present generation, appear to leave commas and semicolons,
+all in fact except full stops and dashes, to their social inferiors.
+
+The remark consoled him, also, by its practical bearing on the present
+situation, for it would enable him to throw the weight of his criticisms
+on this part of Lady Tal's performance.
+
+"You must try, my dear Lady Atalanta," he would say very gravely, "to
+cultivate a--a--somewhat more lucid style--to cut down your sentences a
+little--in fact to do what we pedantic folk call break up the members of
+a period. In order to do so, you must turn your attention very seriously
+to the subject of punctuation, which you seem to have--a--well--rather
+neglected hitherto. I will send for an invaluable little work on the
+subject--'Stops: and how to manage them,' which will give you all
+necessary information. Also, if you can find it in the library of any
+of our friends here, I should recommend your studying a book which I
+used in my boyhood,--a great many years ago, alas!--called 'Blair's
+Rhetoric.'"
+
+If that didn't quench Lady Tal's literary ardour, nothing ever would.
+But all the same he felt bound to read on a little, in order to be able
+to say he had done so.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Jervase Marion fixed his eyes, the eyes of the spirit particularly, upon
+Lady Tal, as he sat opposite her, the next day, at the round dinner
+table, in Palazzo Bragadin.
+
+He was trying to make out how on earth this woman had come to write the
+novel he had been reading. That Lady Tal should possess considerable
+knowledge of the world, and of men and women, did not surprise him in
+the least. He had recognised, in the course of various conversations,
+that this young lady formed an exception to the rule that splendid big
+creatures with regular features and superb complexions are invariably
+idiots.
+
+That Lady Tal should even have a certain talent--about as cultivated as
+that of the little boys who draw horses on their copy books--for plot and
+dialogue, was not astonishing at all, any more than that her sentences
+invariably consisted either of three words, or of twenty-seven lines,
+and that her grammar and spelling were nowhere. All this was quite
+consonant with Lady Tal's history, manner, talk, and with that particular
+beauty of hers--the handsome aquiline features, too clean-cut for
+anything save wood or stone, the bright, cold, blue eyes, which looked
+you in the face when you expected it least, and which looked away from
+you when you expected it least, also; the absence of any of those little
+subtle lines which tell of feeling and thought, and which complete
+visible beauty, while suggesting a beauty transcending mere visible
+things. There was nothing at all surprising in this. But Jervase Marion
+had found in this manuscript something quite distinct and unconnected
+with such matters: he had found the indications of a soul, a very
+decided and unmistakable soul.
+
+And now, looking across the fruit and flowers, and the set out of old
+Venetian glass on Miss Vanderwerf's hospitable table, he asked himself
+in what portion of the magnificent person of Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw
+that soul could possibly be located.
+
+Lady Tal was seated, as I have remarked, immediately opposite Marion,
+and between a rather battered cosmopolitan diplomatist and the young
+millionaire who had been in distress about a sideboard. Further along
+was the Roumanian Princess, and opposite, on the other side of Marion,
+an elderly American siren, in an extremely simple white muslin frock, at
+the first glance the work of the nursery maid, at the second of Worth,
+and symbolising the strange, dangerous fascination of a lady whom you
+took at first for a Puritan and a frump. On the other sat Miss Gertrude
+Ossian, Lady Tal's cousin, a huge young woman with splendid arms and
+shoulders and atrocious manners, who thought Venice such a bore because
+it was too hot to play at tennis and you couldn't ride on canals, and
+consoled herself by attempting to learn the guitar from various effete
+Italian youths, whom she alarmed and delighted in turn.
+
+Among this interesting company Lady Tal was seated with that indefinable
+look of being a great deal too large, too strong, too highly connected,
+and too satisfied with herself and all things, for this miserable,
+effete, plebeian, and self-conscious universe.
+
+She wore a beautifully-made dress of beautifully-shining silk, and her
+shoulders and throat and arms were as beautifully made and as shining as
+her dress; and her blond hair was as elaborately and perfectly arranged
+as it was possible to conceive. That blond hair, verging upon golden,
+piled up in smooth and regular plaits and rolls till it formed a kind of
+hard and fantastic helmet about her very oval face, and arranged in a
+close row of symmetrical little curls upon the high, white, unmarked
+forehead, and about the thin, black, perfectly-arched eyebrows--that
+hair of Lady Tal's symbolised, in the thought of Marion, all that was
+magnificent, conventional, and impassive in this creature. Those blue
+eyes also, which looked at you and away from you, when you expected each
+least, were too large, under the immense arch of eyebrow, to do more
+than look out indifferently upon the world. The mouth was too small in
+its beautiful shape for any contraction or expression of feeling, and
+when she smiled, those tiny white teeth seemed still to shut it. And
+altogether, with its finely-moulded nostrils, which were never dilated,
+and its very oval outline, the whole face affected Marion as a huge
+and handsome mask, as something clapped on and intended to conceal. To
+conceal what? It seemed to the novelist, as he listened to the stream of
+animated conventionalities, of jokes unconnected with any high spirits,
+that the mask of Lady Atalanta's face, like those great stone masks in
+Roman galleries and gardens, concealed the mere absence of everything.
+As Marion contemplated Lady Tal, he reviewed mentally that manuscript
+novel written in a hand as worn down as that of a journalist, and with
+rather less grammar and spelling than might be expected from a nursery
+maid; and he tried to connect the impression it had left on his mind
+with the impression which its author was making at the present moment.
+
+The novel had taken him by surprise by its subject, and even more by its
+particular moral attitude. The story was no story at all, merely the
+unnoticed martyrdom of a delicate and scrupulous woman tied to a vain,
+mean, and frivolous man; the long starvation of a little soul which
+required affections and duties among the unrealities of the world. Not
+at all an uncommon subject nowadays; in fact, Marion could have counted
+you off a score of well-known novels on similar or nearly similar
+themes.
+
+There was nothing at all surprising in the novel, the surprising point
+lay in its having this particular author.
+
+Little by little, as the impression of the book became fainter, and
+the impression of the writer more vivid, Marion began to settle his
+psychological problem. Or rather he began to settle that there was
+no psychological problem at all. This particular theme was in vogue
+nowadays, this particular moral view was rife in the world; Lady Tal
+had read other people's books, and had herself written a book which was
+extremely like theirs. It was a case of unconscious, complete imitation.
+The explanation of Lady Tal's having produced a novel so very different
+from herself, was simply that, as a matter of fact, she had not produced
+that novel at all. It was unlike herself because it belonged to other
+people, that was all.
+
+"Tell me about my novel," she said after dinner, beckoning Marion into
+one of the little gothic balconies overhanging the grand canal; the
+little balconies upon whose cushions and beneath whose drawn-up awning
+there is room for two, just out of earshot of any two others on the
+other balconies beyond.
+
+Places for flirtation. But Lady Tal, Marion had instinctively understood,
+was not a woman who flirted. Her power over men, if she had any, or
+chose to exert it, must be of the sledge-hammer sort. And how she could
+possibly have any power over anything save a mere gaping masher, over
+anything that had, below its starched shirt front, sensitiveness,
+curiosity, and imagination, Marion at this moment utterly failed to
+understand.
+
+The tone of this woman's voice, the very rustle of her dress, as she
+leaned upon the balcony and shook the sparks from her cigarette into the
+dark sky and the dark water, seemed to mean business and nothing but
+business.
+
+She said:
+
+"Tell me all about my novel. I don't intend to be put off with mere
+remarks about grammar and stops. One may learn all about that; or can't
+all that, and style, and so forth, be put in for one, by the printer's
+devil? I haven't a very clear notion what a printer's devil is, except
+that he's a person with a thumb. But he might see to such details, or
+somebody else of the same sort."
+
+"Quite so. A novelist of some slight established reputation would do as
+well, Lady Tal."
+
+Marion wondered why he had made that answer; Lady Tal's remark was
+impertinent only inasmuch as he chose to admit that she could be
+impertinent to him.
+
+Lady Tal, he felt, but could not see, slightly raised one of those
+immensely curved eyebrows of hers in the darkness.
+
+"I thought that you, for instance, might get me through all that,"
+she answered; "or some other novelist, as you say, of established
+reputation, who _was_ benevolently inclined towards a poor, helpless
+ignoramus with literary aspirations."
+
+"Quite apart from such matters--and you are perfectly correct in
+supposing that there must be lots of professed novelists who would most
+gladly assist you with them--quite apart from such matters, your novel,
+if you will allow me to say a rude thing, is utterly impossible. You are
+perpetually taking all sorts of knowledge for granted in your reader.
+Your characters don't sufficiently explain themselves; you write as if
+your reader had witnessed the whole thing and merely required reminding.
+I almost doubt whether you have fully realized for yourself a great part
+of the situation; one would think you were repeating things from
+hearsay, without quite understanding them."
+
+Marion felt a twinge of conscience: that wasn't the impression left by
+the novel, but the impression due to the discrepancy between the novel
+and its author. That hateful habit of studying people, of turning them
+round, prodding and cutting them to see what was inside, why couldn't he
+leave it behind for awhile? Had he not come to Venice with the avowed
+intention of suspending all such studies?
+
+Lady Tal laughed. The laugh was a little harsh. "You say that because
+of the modelling of my face--I know all about modelling of faces, and
+facial angles, and cheek-bones, and eye cavities: I once learned to
+draw--people always judge of me by the modelling of my face. Perhaps
+they are right, perhaps they are wrong. I daresay I _have_ taken too
+much for granted. One ought never to take anything for granted, in the
+way of human insight, ought one? Anyhow, perhaps you will show me when
+I have gone wrong, will you?"
+
+"It will require a good deal of patience----" began Marion.
+
+"On your part, of course. But then it all turns to profit with you
+novelists; and it's men's business to be patient, just because they
+never are."
+
+"I meant on your part, Lady Tal. I question whether you have any notion
+of what it means to recast a novel--to alter it throughout, perhaps not
+only once, but twice, or three times."
+
+"Make me a note of the main wrongness, and send me the MS., will you?
+I'll set about altering it at once, you'll see. I'm a great deal more
+patient than you imagine, Mr. Marion, when I want a thing--and I do
+want this--I want to write novels. I want the occupation, the interest,
+the excitement. Perhaps some day I shall want the money too. One makes
+pots of money in your business, doesn't one?"
+
+Lady Atalanta laughed. She threw her cigarette into the canal, and with
+a crackle and a rustle of her light dress, straightened her huge person,
+and after looking for a moment into the blue darkness full of dim houses
+and irregularly scattered lights, she swept back into the hum of voices
+and shimmer of white dresses of Miss Vanderwerf's big drawing-room.
+
+Jervase Marion remained leaning on the balcony, listening to the plash
+of oar and the bursts of hoarse voices and shrill fiddles from the
+distant music boats.
+
+
+V.
+
+The temptations of that demon of psychological study proved too great
+for Marion; particularly when that tempter allied himself to an equally
+stubborn though less insidious demon apparently residing in Lady
+Atalanta: the demon of amateur authorship. So that, by the end of ten
+days, there was established, between Lady Tal's lodgings and Marion's
+hotel, a lively interchange of communication, porters and gondoliers for
+ever running to and fro between "that usual tall young lady at San Vio,"
+and "that usual short, bald gentleman on the Riva." The number of
+parcels must have been particularly mysterious to these messengers,
+unless the proverbially rapid intuition (inherited during centuries of
+intrigue and spying) of Venetian underlings arrived at the fact that the
+seemingly numberless packets were in reality always one and the same,
+or portions of one and the same: the celebrated novel travelling to and
+fro, with perpetual criticisms from Marion and corrections from Lady
+Atalanta. This method of intercourse was, however, daily supplemented by
+sundry notes, in the delicate, neat little hand of the novelist, or the
+splashing writing of the lady, saying with little variation--"Dear Lady
+Atalanta, I fear I may not have made my meaning very clear with respect
+to Chapter I, II, III, IV--or whatever it might be--will you allow me
+to give you some verbal explanations on the subject?" and "Dear Mr.
+Marion,--_Do_ come _at once_. I've got stuck over that beastly chapter
+V, VI, or VII, and positively _must_ see you about it."
+
+"Well, I never!" politely ejaculated Miss Vanderwerf regularly every
+evening--"if that Marion isn't the most _really_ kind and patient
+creature on this earth!"
+
+To which her friend the Princess, the other arbitress of Venetian
+society in virtue of her palace, her bric-a-brac, and that knowledge of
+Marie Corelli and Mrs. Campbell-Praed which balanced Miss Vanderwerf's
+capacity for grasping the meaning of Gyp--invariably answered in her
+best English colloquial:
+
+"Well, my word! If that Lady Tal's not the most impudent amateur
+scribble-scrabble of all the amateur scribble-scrabbles that England
+produces."
+
+Remarks which immediately produced a lively discussion of Lady Tal
+and of Marion, including the toilettes of the one and the books
+of the other, with the result that neither retained a single moral,
+intellectual, or physical advantage; and the obvious corollary, in the
+mind of the impartial listener, that Jervase Marion evidently gave up
+much more of his time to Lady Tal and her novel than to Miss Vanderwerf
+and the Princess and their respective salons.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, although a degree of impudence more
+politely described as energy and determination, on the part of Lady Tal;
+and of kindness, more correctly designated as feebleness of spirit, on
+the part of Marion, had undoubtedly been necessary in the first stages
+of this intercourse, yet nothing of either of these valuable social
+qualities had been necessary for its continuation. Although maintaining
+that manner of hers expressive of the complete rights which her name of
+Ossian and her additional inches constituted over all things and people,
+Lady Tal had become so genuinely enthusiastic for the novelist's art as
+revealed by Marion, that her perpetual intrusion upon his leisure was
+that merely of an ardent if somewhat inconsiderate disciple. In the
+eyes of this young lady, development of character, foreshortening of
+narrative, construction, syntax, nay, even grammar and punctuation, had
+become inexhaustible subjects of meditation and discussion, upon which
+every experience of life could be brought to bear.
+
+So much for Lady Tal. As regards Marion, he had, not without considerable
+self-contempt, surrendered himself to the demon of character study.
+This passion for investigating into the feelings and motives of his
+neighbours was at once the joy, the pride, and the bane and humiliation
+of Marion's placid life. He was aware that he had, for years and years,
+cultivated this tendency to the utmost; and he was fully convinced that
+to study other folks and embody his studies in the most lucid form was
+the one mission of his life, and a mission in nowise inferior to that of
+any other highly gifted class of creatures. Indeed, if Jervase Marion,
+ever since his earliest manhood, had given way to a tendency to withdraw
+from all personal concerns, from all emotion or action, it was mainly
+because he conceived that this shrinkingness of nature (which foolish
+persons called egoism) was the necessary complement to his power of
+intellectual analysis; and that any departure from the position of
+dispassioned spectator of the world's follies and miseries would mean
+also a departure from his real duty as a novelist. To be brought into
+contact with people more closely than was necessary or advantageous for
+their intellectual comprehension; to think about them, feel about them,
+mistress, wife, son, or daughter, the bare thought of such a thing
+jarred upon Marion's nerves. So, the better to study, the better to be
+solitary, he had expatriated himself, leaving brothers, sisters (now his
+mother was dead), friends of childhood, all those things which invade a
+man's consciousness without any psychological profit; he had condemned
+himself to live in a world of acquaintances, of indifference; and, for
+sole diversion, he permitted himself, every now and then, to come abroad
+to places where he had not even acquaintances, where he could look
+at faces which had no associations for him, and speculate upon the
+character of total strangers. Only, being a methodical man, and much
+concerned for his bodily and intellectual health, he occasionally
+thought fit to suspend even this contact with mankind, and to spend six
+weeks, as he had intended spending those six weeks at Venice, in the
+contemplation of only bricks and mortar.
+
+And now, that demon of psychological study had got the better of his
+determination. Marion understood it all now from the beginning: that
+astonishing feebleness of his towards Lady Atalanta, that extraordinary
+submission to this imperious and audacious young aristocrat's orders.
+The explanation was simple, though curious. He had divined in Lady
+Atalanta a very interesting psychological problem, considerably before
+he had been able to formulate the fact to himself: his novelist's
+intuition, like the scent of a dog, had set him on the track even before
+he knew the nature of the game, or the desire to pursue. Before even
+beginning to think about Lady Atalanta, he had begun to watch her; he
+was watching her now consciously; indeed all his existence was engrossed
+in such watching, so that the hours he spent away from her company, or
+the company of her novel, were so many gaps in his life.
+
+Jervase Marion, as a result both of that shrinkingness of nature, and
+of a very delicate artistic instinct, had an aversion of such coarse
+methods of study as consist in sitting down in front of a human being
+and staring, in a metaphorical sense, at him or her. He was not a man of
+theories (their cut-and-driedness offending his subtlety); but had he
+been forced to formulate his ideas, he would have said that in order to
+perceive the real values (in pictorial language) of any individual, you
+must beware of isolating him or her; you must merely look attentively
+at the moving ocean of human faces, watching for the one face more
+particularly interesting than the rest, and catching glimpses of its
+fleeting expression, and of the expression of its neighbours as it
+appears and reappears. Perhaps, however, Marion's other reason against
+the sit-down-and-stare or walk-round-and-pray system of psychological
+study was really the stronger one in his nature, the more so that he
+would probably not have admitted its superior validity. This other
+reason was a kind of moral scruple against getting to know the secret
+mechanism of a soul, especially if such knowledge involved an appearance
+of intimacy with a person in whom he could never take more than a merely
+abstract, artistic interest. It was a mean taking advantage of superior
+strength, or the raising of expectations which could not be fulfilled;
+for Marion, although the most benevolent and serviceable of mortals, did
+not give his heart, perhaps because he had none to give, to anybody.
+
+This scruple had occurred to Marion almost as soon as he discovered
+himself to be studying Lady Tal; and it occurred to him once or twice
+afterwards. But he despatched it satisfactorily. Lady Tal, in the first
+place, was making use of him in the most outrageous way, without scruple
+or excuse; it was only just that he, in his turn, should turn her to
+profit with equal freedom. This reason, however, savoured slightly of
+intellectual caddishness, and Marion rejected it with scorn. The real
+one, he came to perceive, was that Lady Tal gratuitously offered herself
+for study by her quiet, aggressive assumption of inscrutability. She
+really thrust her inscrutability down one's throat; her face, her
+manner, her every remark, her very novel, were all so many audacious
+challenges to the more psychological members of the community. She
+seemed to be playing on a gong and crying: "Does anyone feel inclined
+to solve a riddle? Is there any person who thinks himself sufficiently
+clever to understand me?" And when a woman takes up such an attitude,
+it is only natural, human and proper that the first novelist who comes
+along that way should stop and say: "I intend to get to the bottom of
+you; one, two, three, I am going to begin."
+
+So Jervase Marion assiduously cultivated the society of Lady Atalanta,
+and spent most of his time instructing her in the art of the novelist.
+
+
+VI.
+
+One morning Marion, by way of exception, saw and studied Lady Tal
+without the usual medium of the famous novel. It was early, with the
+very first autumn crispness in the blue morning, in the bright sun which
+would soon burn, but as yet barely warmed. Marion was taking his usual
+ramble through the tortuous Venetian alleys, and as usual he had found
+himself in one of his favourite haunts, the market on the further slope
+of the Rialto.
+
+That market--the yellow and white awnings, and the white houses against
+the delicate blue sky; the bales and festoons of red and green and blue
+and purple cotton stuffs outside the little shops, and below that the
+shawled women pattering down the bridge steps towards it; the monumental
+display of piled up peaches and pears, and heaped up pumpkins and
+mysterious unknown cognate vegetables, round and long, purple, yellow,
+red, grey, among the bay leaves, the great, huge, smooth, green-striped
+things, cut open to show their red pulp, the huger things looking as if
+nature had tried to gild and silver them unsuccessfully, tumbled on to
+the pavement; the butchers' shops with the gorgeous bullocks' hearts
+and sacrificial fleeced lambs; the endless hams and sausages--all this
+market, under the blue sky, with this lazy, active, noisy, brawling,
+friendly population jerking and lolling about it, always seemed to
+Marion one of the delightful spots of Venice, pleasing him with a sense
+(although he knew it to be all false) that here _was_ a place where
+people could eat and drink and laugh and live without any psychological
+troubles.
+
+On this particular morning, as this impression with the knowledge of its
+falseness was as usual invading Marion's consciousness, he experienced
+a little shock of surprise, incongruity, and the sudden extinction of
+a pleasingly unreal mood, on perceiving, coming towards him, with hand
+cavalierly on hip and umbrella firmly hitting the ground, the stately
+and faultlessly coated and shirted and necktied figure of Lady Atalanta.
+
+"I have had a go already at _Christina_," she said, after extending
+to Marion an angular though friendly handshake, and a cheerful frank
+inscrutable smile of her big blue eyes and her little red mouth. "That
+novel is turning me into another woman: the power of sinning, as the
+Salvationists say, has been extracted out of my nature even by the
+rootlets; I sat up till two last night after returning from the Lido,
+and got up this morning at six, all for the love of _Christina_ and
+literature. I expect Dawson will give me warning; she told me yesterday
+that she 'had never _know_ any other lady that writes so much or used
+them big sheets of paper, quite _henormous_, my lady.' Dear old place,
+isn't it? Ever tasted any of that fried pumpkin? It's rather nasty but
+quite good; have some? I wonder we've not met here before; I come here
+twice a week to shop. You don't mind carrying parcels, do you?" Lady Tal
+had stopped at one of the front stalls, and having had three vast yellow
+paper bags filled with oranges and lemons, she handed the two largest to
+Marion.
+
+"You'll carry them for me, won't you, there's a good creature: like
+that I shall be able to get rather more rolls than I usually can. It's
+astonishing how much sick folk care for rolls. I ought to explain I'm
+going to see some creatures at the hospital. It takes too long going
+there in the gondola from my place, so I walk. If you were to put those
+bags well on your chest like that, under your chin, they'd be easier to
+hold, and there'd be less chance of the oranges bobbing out."
+
+At a baker's in one of the little narrow streets near the church of the
+Miracoli, Lady Atalanta provided herself with a bag of rolls, which she
+swung by the string to her wrist. Marion then perceived that she was
+carrying under her arm a parcel of paper-covered books, fastened with an
+elastic band.
+
+"Now we shall have got everything except some flowers, which I daresay
+we can get somewhere on the way," remarked Lady Tal. "Do you mind coming
+in here?" and she entered one of those little grocer's shops, dignified
+with the arms of Savoy in virtue of the sale of salt and tobacco, and
+where a little knot of vague, wide-collared individuals usually hang
+about among the various-shaped liqueur bottles in an atmosphere of stale
+cigar, brandy and water, and kitchen soap.
+
+"May--I--a--a--ask for anything for you, Lady Tal?" requested Marion,
+taken completely by surprise by the rapidity of his companion's
+movements. "You want stamps, I presume; may I have the honour of
+assisting you in your purchase?"
+
+"Thanks, it isn't stamps; it's snuff, and you wouldn't know what
+sort to get." And Lady Tal, making her stately way through the crowd
+of surprised loafers, put a franc on the counter and requested the
+presiding female to give her four ounces of _Semolino_, but of the good
+sort----"It's astonishing how faddy those old creatures are about their
+snuff!" remarked Lady Tal, pocketing her change. "Would you put this
+snuff in your pocket for me? Thanks. The other sort's called _Bacubino_,
+it's dark and clammy, and it looks nasty. Have you ever taken snuff? I
+do sometimes to please my old creatures; it makes me sneeze, you know,
+and they think that awful fun."
+
+As they went along Lady Atalanta suddenly perceived, in a little green
+den, something which attracted her attention.
+
+"I wonder whether they're fresh?" she mused. "I suppose you can't tell a
+fresh egg when you see it, can you, Mr. Marion? Never mind, I'll risk
+it. If you'll take this third bag of oranges, I'll carry the eggs--they
+might come to grief in your hands, you know."
+
+"What an odious, odious creature a woman is," thought Marion. He
+wondered, considerably out of temper, why he should feel so miserable
+at having to carry all those oranges. Of course with three gaping
+bags piled on his chest there was the explanation of acute physical
+discomfort; but that wasn't sufficient. It seemed as if this terrible,
+aristocratic giantess were doing it all on purpose to make him miserable.
+He saw that he was intensely ridiculous in her eyes, with those yellow
+bags against his white waistcoat and the parcel of snuff in his coat
+pocket; his face was also, he thought, streaming with perspiration, and
+he couldn't get at his handkerchief. It was childish, absurd of him to
+mind; for, after all, wasn't Lady Atalanta equally burdened? But she,
+with her packets of rolls, and packet of books, and basket of eggs, and
+her umbrella tucked under her arm, looked serene and even triumphant in
+her striped flannel.
+
+"I beg your pardon--would you allow me to stop a minute and shift the
+bags to the other arm?" Marion could no longer resist that fearful agony.
+"If you go on I'll catch you up in a second."
+
+But just as Marion was about to rest the bags upon the marble balustrade
+of a bridge, his paralysed arm gave an unaccountable jerk, and out flew
+one of the oranges, and rolled slowly down the stone steps of the
+bridge.
+
+"I say, don't do that! You'll have them all in the canal!" cried Lady
+Atalanta, as Marion quickly stooped in vain pursuit of the escaped
+orange, the movement naturally, and as if it were being done on purpose,
+causing another orange to fly out in its turn; a small number of
+spectators, gondoliers and workmen from under the bridge, women nursing
+babies at neighbouring windows, and barefooted urchins from nowhere in
+particular, starting up to enjoy the extraordinary complicated conjuring
+tricks which the stout gentleman in the linen coat and Panama hat had
+suddenly fallen to execute.
+
+"Damn the beastly things!" ejaculated Marion, forgetful of Lady Atalanta
+and good breeding, and perceiving only the oranges jumping and rolling
+about, and feeling his face grow redder and hotter in the glare on that
+white stone bridge. At that moment, as he raised his eyes, he saw,
+passing along, a large party of Americans from his hotel; Americans whom
+he had avoided like the plague, who, he felt sure, would go home and
+represent him as a poor creature and a snob disavowing his "people." He
+could hear them, in fancy, describing how at Venice he had turned flunky
+to one of your English aristocrats, who stood looking and making game
+of him while he ran after her oranges, "and merely because she's the
+daughter of an Earl or Marquis or such like."
+
+"Bless my heart, how helpless is genius when it comes to practical
+matters!" exclaimed Lady Atalanta. And putting her various packages down
+carefully on the parapet, she calmly collected the bounding oranges,
+wiped them with her handkerchief, and restored them to Marion,
+recommending him to "stick them loose in his pockets."
+
+Marion had never been in a hospital (he had been only a boy, and in
+Europe with his mother, a Southern refugee, at the time of the War),
+the fact striking him as an omission in his novelist's education. But
+he felt as if he would never wish to describe the one into which he
+mechanically followed Lady Tal. With its immense, immensely lofty wards,
+filled with greyish light, and radiating like the nave and transepts
+of a vast church from an altar with flickering lights and kneeling
+figures, it struck Marion, while he breathed that hot, thick air,
+sickly with carbolic and chloride of lime, as a most gruesome and
+quite objectionably picturesque place. He had a vague notion that the
+creatures in the rows and rows of greyish white beds ought to have St.
+Vitus's dance or leprosy or some similar mediaeval disease. They were
+nasty enough objects, he thought, as he timidly followed Lady Tal's
+rapid and resounding footsteps, for anything. He had, for all the
+prosaic quality of his writings, the easily roused imagination of a
+nervous man: and it seemed to him as if they were all of them either
+skeletons gibbering and screeching in bed, or frightful yellow and red
+tumid creatures, covered with plasters and ligatures, or old ladies
+recently liberated from the cellar in which, as you may periodically
+read in certain public prints, they had been kept by barbarous nephews
+or grandchildren----
+
+"Dear me, dear me, what a dreadful place!" he kept ejaculating, as he
+followed Lady Atalanta, carrying her bags of oranges and rolls, among
+the vociferating, grabbing beldames in bed, and the indifferent nuns and
+serving wenches toiling about noisily: Lady Tal going methodically her
+way, businesslike, cheerful, giving to one some snuff, to another an
+orange or a book, laughing, joking in her bad Italian, settling the
+creatures' disagreeable bed-clothes and pillows for them, as if instead
+of cosseting dying folk, she was going round to the counters of some
+huge shop. A most painful exhibition, thought Marion.
+
+"I say, suppose you talk to her, she's a nice little commonplace
+creature who wanted to be a school-mistress and is awfully fond of
+reading novels--tell her--I don't know how to explain it--that you
+write novels. See, Teresina, this gentleman and I are writing a book
+together, all about a lady who married a silly husband--would you like
+to hear about it?"
+
+Stroking the thin white face, with the wide forget-me-not eyes, of
+the pretty, thin little blonde, Lady Tal left Marion, to his extreme
+discomfort, seated on the edge of a straw chair by the side of the bed,
+a bag of oranges on his knees and absolutely no ideas in his head.
+
+"She is so good," remarked the little girl, opening and shutting a
+little fan which Lady Tal had just given her, "and so beautiful. Is she
+your sister? She told me she had a brother whom she was very fond of,
+but I thought he was dead. She's like an angel in Paradise."
+
+"Precisely, precisely," answered Marion, thinking at the same time what
+an uncommonly uncomfortable place Paradise must, in that case, be. All
+this was not at all what he had imagined when he had occasionally
+written about young ladies consoling the sick; this businesslike,
+bouncing, cheerful shake-up-your-pillows and shake-up-your-soul mode
+of proceeding.
+
+Lady Tal, he decided within himself, had emphatically no soul; all he
+had just witnessed, proved it.
+
+"Why do you do it?" he suddenly asked, as they emerged from the hospital
+cloisters. He knew quite well: merely because she was so abominably
+active.
+
+"I don't know. I like ill folk. I'm always so disgustingly well myself;
+and you see with my poor brother, I'd got accustomed to ill folk, so I
+suppose I can't do without. I should like to settle in England--if it
+weren't for all those hateful relations of mine and of my husband's--and
+go and live in the East End and look after sick creatures. At least I
+think I should; but I know I shouldn't."
+
+"Why not?" asked Marion.
+
+"Why? Oh, well, it's making oneself conspicuous, you know, and all that.
+One hates to be thought eccentric, of course. And then, if I went to
+England, of course I should have to go into society, otherwise people
+would go and say that I was out of it and had been up to something or
+other. And if I went into society, that would mean doing simply nothing
+else, not even the little I do here. You see I'm not an independent
+woman; all my husband's relations are perpetually ready to pull me to
+pieces on account of his money! There's nothing they're not prepared to
+invent about me. I'm too poor and too expensive to do without it, and
+as long as I take his money, I must see to no one being able to say
+anything that would have annoyed him--see?"
+
+"I see," answered Marion.
+
+At that moment Lady Atalanta perceived a gondola turning a corner, and
+in it the young millionaire whom she had chaffed about his sideboard.
+
+"Hi, hi! Mr. Clarence!" she cried, waving her umbrella. "Will you take
+me to that curiosity-dealer's this afternoon?"
+
+Marion looked at her, standing there on the little wharf, waving her
+red umbrella and shouting to the gondola; her magnificent rather wooden
+figure more impeccably magnificent, uninteresting in her mannish
+flannel garments, her handsome pink and white face, as she smiled that
+inexpressive smile with all the pearl-like little teeth, more than ever
+like a big mask----
+
+"No soul, decidedly no soul," said the novelist to himself. And he
+reflected that women without souls were vaguely odious.
+
+
+VII.
+
+"I have been wondering of late why I liked you?" said Lady Tal one
+morning at lunch, addressing the remark to Marion, and cut short in her
+speech by a burst of laughter from that odious tomboy of a cousin of
+hers (how could she endure that girl? Marion reflected) who exclaimed,
+with an affectation of milkmaid archness:
+
+"Oh, Tal! how _can_ you be so rude to the _gentleman_? You oughtn't to
+say to people you wonder why you like them. Ought she, Mr. Marion?"
+
+Marion was silent. He felt a weak worm for disliking this big blond girl
+with the atrocious manners, who insisted on pronouncing his name _Mary
+Anne_, with unfailing relish of the joke. Lady Tal did not heed the
+interruption, but repeated pensively, leaning her handsome cleft chin on
+her hand, and hacking at a peach with her knife: "I have been wondering
+why I like you, Mr. Marion (I usedn't to, but made up to you for
+_Christina's_ benefit), because you are not a bit like poor Gerald. But
+I've found out now and I'm pleased. There's nothing so pleasant in this
+world as finding out _why_ one thinks or does things, is there? Indeed
+it's the only pleasant thing, besides riding in the Campagna and
+drinking iced water on a hot day. The reason I like you is because you
+have seen a lot of the world and of people, and still take nice views
+of them. The people one meets always think to show their cleverness by
+explaining everything by nasty little motives; and you don't. It's nice
+of you, and it's clever. It's cleverer than your books even, you know."
+
+In making this remark (and she made it with an aristocratic indifference
+to being personal) Lady Atalanta had most certainly hit the right nail
+on the head. That gift, a rare one, of seeing the simple, wholesome,
+and even comparatively noble, side of things; of being, although a
+pessimist, no misanthrope, was the most remarkable characteristic of
+Jervase Marion; it was the one which made him, for all his old bachelor
+ways and his shrinking from close personal contact, a man and a manly
+man, giving this analytical and nervous person a certain calmness and
+gentleness and strength.
+
+But Lady Tal's remark, although in the main singularly correct, smote
+him like a rod. For it so happened that for once in his life Marion had
+not been looking with impartial, serene, and unsuspecting eyes upon one
+of his fellow-sufferers in this melancholy world; and that one creature
+to whom he was not so good as he might be, was just Lady Tal.
+
+He could not really have explained how it was. But there was the
+certainty, that while recognising in Lady Tal's conversation, in her
+novel, in the little she told him of her life, a great deal which was
+delicate, and even noble, wherewithal to make up a somewhat unusual and
+perhaps not very superficially attractive, but certainly an original and
+desirable personality, he had got into the habit of explaining whatever
+in her was obscure and contradictory by unworthy reasons; and even of
+making allowance for the possibility of all the seeming good points
+proving, some day, to be a delusion and a snare. Perhaps it depended
+upon the constant criticisms he was hearing on all sides of Lady
+Atalanta's character and conduct: the story of her mercenary marriage,
+the recital of the astounding want of feeling displayed upon the
+occasion of her brother's death, and that perpetual, and apparently too
+well founded suggestion that this young lady, who possessed fifteen
+thousand a year and apparently spent about two, must be feathering her
+nest and neatly evading the intentions of her late lamented. Moreover
+there was something vaguely disagreeable in the extraordinary absence of
+human emotion displayed in such portion of her biography as might be
+considered public property.
+
+Marion, heaven knows, didn't like women who went in for _grande passion_;
+in fact passion, which he had neither experienced nor described, was
+distinctly repulsive to him. But, after all, Lady Tal was young, Lady
+Tal was beautiful, and Lady Tal had for years and years been a real and
+undoubted widow; and it was therefore distinctly inhuman on the part of
+Lady Tal to have met no temptations to part with her heart, and with her
+jointure. It was ugly; there was no doubt it was ugly. The world, after
+all, _has_ a right to demand that a young lady of good birth and average
+education should have a heart. It was doubtless also, he said to himself,
+the fault of Lady Atalanta's physique, this suspicious attitude of his;
+nature had bestowed upon her a face like a mask, muscles which never
+flinched, nerves apparently hidden many inches deeper than most folk's:
+she was enigmatic, and a man has a right to pause before an enigma.
+Furthermore----But Marion could not quite understand that furthermore.
+
+He understood it a few days later. They had had the usual _seance_ over
+_Christina_ that morning; and now it was evening, and three or four
+people had dropped in at Lady Tal's after the usual stroll at Saint
+Mark's. Lady Tal had hired a small house, dignified with the title of
+Palazzina, on the Zattere. It was modern, and the aesthetic colony at
+Venice sneered at a woman with that amount of money inhabiting anything
+short of a palace. They themselves being mainly Americans, declared
+they couldn't feel like home in a dwelling which was not possessed of
+historical reminiscences. The point of Lady Tal's little place, as she
+called it, was that it possessed a garden; small indeed, but round
+which, as she remarked, one solitary female could walk. In this garden
+she and Marion were at this moment walking. The ground floor windows
+were open, and there issued from the drawing-room a sound of cups and
+saucers, of guitar strumming and laughter, above which rose the loud
+voice, the aristocratic kitchen-maid pronunciation of Lady Atalanta's
+tomboy cousin.
+
+"Where's Tal? I declare if Tal hasn't gone off with Mary Anne! Poor Mary
+Anne! She's tellin' him all about _Christina_, you know; how she can't
+manage that row between Christina and Christina's mother-in-law, and the
+semicolons and all that. _Christina's_ the novel, you know. You'll be
+expected to ask for _Christina_ at your club, you know, when it comes
+out, Mr. Clarence. I've already written to all my cousins to get it from
+Mudie's----"
+
+Marion gave a little frown, as if his boot pinched him, as he walked
+on the gravel down there, among the dark bushes, the spectral little
+terra-cotta statues, with the rigging of the ships on the Giudecca canal
+black against the blue evening sky, with a vague, sweet, heady smell of
+_Olea fragrans_ all round. Confound that girl! Why couldn't he take a
+stroll in a garden with a handsome woman of thirty without the company
+being informed that it was only on account of Lady Tal's novel. That
+novel, that position of literary adviser, of a kind of male daily
+governess, would make him ridiculous. Of course Lady Tal was continually
+making use of him, merely making use of him in her barefaced and brutal
+manner: of course she didn't care a hang about him except to help her
+with that novel: of course as soon as that novel was done with she would
+drop him. He knew all that, and it was natural. But he really didn't see
+the joke of being made conspicuous and grotesque before all Venice----
+
+"Shan't we go in, Lady Tal?" he said sharply, throwing away his
+cigarette. "Your other guests are doubtless sighing for your presence."
+
+"And this guest here is not. Oh dear, no; there's Gertrude to look after
+them and see to their being happy; besides, I don't care whether they
+are. I want to speak to you. I can't understand your thinking that
+situation strained. I should have thought it the commonest thing in the
+world, I mean, gracious---- I can't understand your not understanding!"
+
+Jervase Marion was in the humour when he considered Lady Tal a
+legitimate subject of study, and intellectual vivisection a praiseworthy
+employment. Such study implies, as a rule, a good deal of duplicity on
+the part of the observer; duplicity doubtless sanctified, like all the
+rest, by the high mission of prying into one's neighbour's soul.
+
+"Well," answered Marion--he positively hated that good French Alabama
+name of his, since hearing it turned into Mary Anne--"of course one
+understands a woman avoiding, for many reasons, the temptation of one
+individual passion; but a woman who makes up her mind to avoid the
+temptation of all passion in the abstract, and what is more, acts
+consistently and persistently with this object in view, particularly
+when she has never experienced passion at all, when she has not even
+burnt the tips of her fingers once in her life----; that does seem
+rather far fetched, you must admit."
+
+Lady Tal was not silent for a moment, as he expected she would be.
+She did not seem to see the danger of having the secret of her life
+extracted out of her.
+
+"I don't see why you should say so, merely because the person's a woman.
+I'm sure you must have met examples enough of men who, without ever
+having been in love, or in danger of being in love--poor little
+things--have gone through life with a resolute policy of never placing
+themselves in danger, of never so much as taking their heart out of
+their waistcoat pockets to look at it, lest it might suddenly be jerked
+out of their possession."
+
+It was Marion who was silent. Had it not been dark, Lady Tal might have
+seen him wince and redden; and he might have seen Lady Tal smile a very
+odd but not disagreeable smile. And they fell to discussing the
+technicalities of that famous novel.
+
+Marion outstayed for a moment or two the other guests. The facetious
+cousin was strumming in the next room, trying over a Venetian song which
+the naval captain had taught her. Marion was slowly taking a third cup
+of tea--he wondered why he should be taking so much tea, it was very
+bad for his nerves,--seated among the flowering shrubs, the bits of old
+brocade and embroidery, the various pieces of bric-a-brac which made the
+drawing-room of Lady Tal look, as all distinguished modern drawing-rooms
+should, like a cross between a flower show and a pawnbroker's, and as if
+the height of modern upholstery consisted in avoiding the use of needles
+and nails, and enabling the visitors to sit in a little heap of
+variegated rags. Lady Tal was arranging a lamp, which burned, or rather
+smoked, at this moment, surrounded by lace petticoats on a carved
+column.
+
+"Ah," she suddenly said, "it's extraordinary how difficult it is to get
+oneself understood in this world. I'm thinking about _Christina_, you
+know. I never _do_ expect any one to understand anything, as a matter of
+fact. But I thought that was probably because all my friends hitherto
+have been all frivolous poops who read only the Peerage and the sporting
+papers. I should have thought, now, that writing novels would have made
+you different. I suppose, after all, it's all a question of physical
+constitution and blood relationship--being able to understand other
+folk, I mean. If one's molecules aren't precisely the same and in the
+same place (don't be surprised, I've been reading Carpenter's 'Mental
+Physiology'), it's no good. It's certain that the only person in the
+world who has ever understood me one bit was Gerald."
+
+Lady Tal's back was turned to Marion, her tall figure a mere dark mass
+against the light of the lamp, and the lit-up white wall behind.
+
+"And still," suddenly remarked Marion, "you were not--not--_very_ much
+attached to your brother, were you?"
+
+The words were not out of Marion's mouth before he positively trembled
+at them. Good God! what had he allowed himself to say? But he had no
+time to think of his own words. Lady Tal had turned round, her eyes fell
+upon him. Her face was pale, very quiet; not angry, but disdainful. With
+one hand she continued to adjust the lamp.
+
+"I see," she said coldly, "you have heard all about my extraordinary
+behaviour, or want of extraordinary behaviour. It appears I did surprise
+and shock my acquaintances very much by my proceedings after Gerald's
+death. I suppose it really is the right thing for a woman to go into
+hysterics and take to her bed and shut herself up for three months at
+least, when her only brother dies. I didn't think of that at the time;
+otherwise I should have conformed, of course. It's my policy always to
+conform, you know. I see now that I made a mistake, showed a want of
+_savoir-vivre_, and all that--I stupidly consulted my own preferences,
+and I happened to prefer keeping myself well in hand. I didn't seem to
+like people's sympathy; now the world, you know, has a right to give one
+its sympathies under certain circumstances, just as a foreign man has
+a right to leave his card when he's been introduced. Also, I knew
+that Gerald would have just hated my making myself a _motley to the
+view_--you mightn't think it, but we used to read Shakespeare's sonnets,
+he and I--and, you see, I cared for only one mortal thing in the world,
+to do what Gerald wanted. I never have cared for any other thing,
+really; after all, if I don't want to be conspicuous, it's because
+Gerald would have hated it--I never shall care for anything in the world
+besides that. All the rest's mere unreality. One thinks one's alive, but
+one isn't."
+
+Lady Atalanta had left off fidgeting with the lamp. Her big blue eyes
+had all at once brightened with tears which did not fall; but as she
+spoke the last words, in a voice suddenly husky, she looked down at
+Marion with an odd smile, tearing a paper spill with her large,
+well-shaped fingers as she did so.
+
+"Do you see?" she added, with that half-contemptuous smile, calmly
+mopping her eyes. "That's how it is, Mr. Marion."
+
+A sudden light illuminated Marion's mind; a light, and with it something
+else, he knew not what, something akin to music, to perfume, beautiful,
+delightful, but solemn. He was aware of being moved, horribly grieved,
+but at the same moment intensely glad; he was on the point of saying he
+didn't know beforehand what, something which, however, would be all
+right, natural, like the things, suddenly improvised, which one says
+occasionally to children.
+
+"My dear young lady----"
+
+But the words did not pass Marion's lips. He remembered suddenly by what
+means and in what spirit he had elicited this unexpected burst of
+feeling on the part of Lady Tal. He could not let her go on, he could
+not take advantage of her; he had not the courage to say: "Lady Tal, I
+am a miserable cad who was prying into your feelings; I'm not fit to be
+spoken to!" And with the intolerable shame at his own caddishness came
+that old shrinking from any sort of spiritual contact with others.
+
+"Quite so, quite so," he merely answered, looking at his boots and
+moving that ring of his mother's up and down his watch chain. "I quite
+understand. And as a matter of fact you are quite correct in your remark
+about our not being always alive. Or rather we _are_ usually alive, when
+we are living our humdrum little natural existence, full of nothing at
+all; and during the moments when we do really seem to be alive, to be
+feeling, living, we are not ourselves, but somebody else."
+
+Marion had had no intention of making a cynical speech. He had been
+aware of having behaved like a cad to Lady Tal, and in consequence,
+had somehow informed Lady Tal he considered her as an impostor. He
+had reacted against that first overwhelming sense of pleasure at the
+discovery of the lady's much-questioned soul. Now he was prepared to
+tell her that she had none.
+
+"Yes," answered Lady Tal, lighting a cigarette over the high lamp,
+"that's just it. I shall borrow that remark and put it into _Christina_.
+You may use up any remark of mine, in return, you know."
+
+She stuck out her under lip with that ugly little cynical movement which
+was not even her own property, but borrowed from women more trivial than
+herself like the way of carrying the elbows, and the pronunciation of
+certain words: a mark of caste, as a blue triangle on one's chin or a
+yellow butterfly on one's forehead might be, and not more graceful or
+engaging.
+
+"One thinks one has a soul sometimes," she mused. "It isn't true. It
+would prevent one's clothes fitting, wouldn't it? One really acts
+in this way or that because _it's better form_. You see here on the
+Continent it's good form to tear one's hair and roll on the floor, and
+to pretend to have a soul; we've got beyond that, as we've got beyond
+women trying to seem to know about art and literature. Here they do, and
+make idiots of themselves. Just now you thought I'd got a soul, didn't
+you, Mr. Marion? You've been wondering all along whether I had one. For
+a minute I managed to make you believe it--it was rather mean of me,
+wasn't it? I haven't got one. I'm a great deal too well-bred."
+
+There was a little soreness under all this banter; but how could she
+banter? Marion felt he detested the woman, as she put out her elbow and
+extended a stiff handsome hand, and said:
+
+"Remember poor old _Christina_ to-morrow morning, there's a kind man,"
+with that little smile of close eyes and close lips. He detested her
+just in proportion as he had liked her half an hour ago. Remembering
+that little gush of feeling of his own, he thought her a base creature,
+as he walked across the little moonlit square with the well in the
+middle and the tall white houses all round.
+
+Jervase Marion, the next morning, woke up with the consciousness of
+having been very unfair to Lady Tal, and, what was worse, very unfair to
+himself. It was one of the drawbacks of friendship (for, after all, this
+was a kind of friendship) that he occasionally caught himself saying
+things quite different from his thoughts and feelings, masquerading
+towards people in a manner distinctly humiliating to his self-respect.
+Marion had a desire to be simple and truthful; but somehow it was
+difficult to be simple and truthful as soon as other folk came into
+play; it was difficult and disagreeable to show one's real self; that
+was another reason for living solitary on a top flat at Westminster, and
+descending therefrom in the body, but not in the spirit, to move about
+among mere acquaintances, disembodied things, with whom there was no
+fear of real contact. On this occasion he had let himself come in
+contact with a fellow-creature; and behold, as a result, he had not only
+behaved more or less like a cad, but he had done that odious thing of
+pretending to feel differently from how he really did.
+
+From how he had really felt at the moment, be it well understood. Of
+course Marion, in his capacity of modern analytical novelist, was
+perfectly well aware that feelings are mere momentary matters; and that
+the feeling which had possessed him the previous evening, and still
+possessed him at the present moment, would not last. The feeling, he
+admitted to himself (it is much easier to admit such things to one's
+self, when one makes the proviso that it's all a mere passing phase,
+one's eternal immutable self, looking on placidly at one's momentary
+changing self), the feeling in question was vaguely admiring and
+pathetic, as regarded Lady Tal. He even confessed to himself that there
+entered into it a slight dose of poetry. This big, correct young woman,
+with the beautiful inexpressive face and the ugly inexpressive manners,
+carrying through life a rather exotic little romance which no one
+must suspect, possessed a charm for the imagination, a decided value.
+Excluded for some reason (Marion blurred out his knowledge that the
+reasons were the late Walkenshaw's thousands) from the field for
+emotions and interests which handsome, big young women have a right to,
+and transferring them all to a nice crippled brother, who had of course
+not been half as nice as she imagined, living a conventional life, with
+a religion of love and fidelity secreted within it, this well-born and
+well-dressed Countess Olivia of modern days, had appealed very strongly
+to a certain carefully guarded tenderness and chivalry in Marion's
+nature; he saw her, as she had stood arranging that lamp, with those
+unexpected tears brimming in her eyes.
+
+Decidedly. Only that, of course, wasn't the way to treat it. There
+was nothing at all artistic in that, nothing modern. And Marion was
+essentially modern in his novels. Lady Tal, doing the Lady Olivia, with
+a dead brother in the background, sundry dukes in the middle distance,
+and no enchanting page (people seemed unanimous in agreeing that Lady
+Tal had never been in love) perceptible anywhere; all that was pretty,
+but it wasn't the right thing. Jervase Marion thought Lady Tal painfully
+conventional (although of course her conventionality gave all the value
+to her romantic quality) because she slightly dropped her final _g_'s,
+and visibly stuck out her elbows, and resolutely refused to display
+emotion of any kind. Marion himself was firmly wedded to various modes
+of looking at human concerns, which corresponded, in the realm of
+novel-writing, to these same modern conventionalities of Lady
+Atalanta's. The point of it, evidently, must be that the Lady of his
+novel would have lived for years under the influence of an invalid
+friend (the brother should be turned into a woman with a mortal malady,
+and a bad husband, something in the way of Emma and Tony in "Diana of
+the Crossways," of intellectual and moral quality immensely superior to
+her own); then, of course, after the death of the Princess of Trasimeno
+(she being the late Gerald Burne), Lady Tal (Marion couldn't fix on a
+name for her) would gradually be sucked back into frivolous and futile
+and heartless society; the _hic_ of the whole story being the slow
+ebbing of that noble influence, the daily encroachments of the baser
+sides of Lady Tal's own nature, and of the base side of the world.
+She would have a chance, say by marrying a comparatively poor man, of
+securing herself from that rising tide of worldly futility and meanness;
+the reader must think that she really was going to love the man, to
+choose him. Or rather, it would be more modern and artistic, less
+romantic, if the intelligent reader were made to foresee the dismal
+necessity of Lady Tal's final absorption into moral and intellectual
+nothingness. Yes--the sort of thing she would live for, a round of
+monotonous dissipation, which couldn't amuse her; of expenditure merely
+for the sake of expenditure, of conventionality merely for the sake
+of conventionality;--and the sham, clever, demoralised women, with
+their various semi-imaginary grievances against the world, their
+husbands and children, their feeble self-conscious hankerings after
+mesmerism, spiritualism, Buddhism, and the other forms of intellectual
+adulteration----he saw it all. Marion threw his cigar into the canal,
+and nursed his leg tighter, as he sat all alone in his gondola, and
+looked up at the bay trees and oleanders, the yellow straw blinds of
+Lady Tal's little house on the Zattere.
+
+It would make a capital novel. Marion's mind began to be inundated
+with details: all those conversations about Lady Tal rushed back into
+it, her conventionality, perceptible even to others, her disagreeable
+parsimoniousness, visibly feathering her nest with the late Walkenshaw's
+money, while quite unable to screw up her courage to deliberately forego
+it, that odd double-graspingness of nature.
+
+That was evidently the final degradation. It would be awfully plucky to
+put it in, after showing what the woman had been and might have been;
+after showing her coquettings with better things (the writing of that
+novel, for instance, for which he must find an equivalent). It would
+be plucky, modern, artistic, to face the excessive sordidness of this
+ending. And still--and still----Marion felt a feeble repugnance to
+putting it in; it seemed too horrid. And at the same moment, there
+arose in him that vague, disquieting sense of being a cad, which had
+distressed him that evening. To suspect a woman of all that----and yet,
+Marion answered himself with a certain savageness, he knew it to be the
+case.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+They had separated from the rest of the picnickers, and were walking up
+and down that little orchard or field--rows of brown maize distaffs and
+tangles of reddening half trodden-down maize leaves, and patches of tall
+grass powdered with hemlock under the now rather battered vine garlands,
+the pomegranate branches weighed down by their vermilion fruit, the
+peach branches making a Japanese pattern of narrow crimson leaves
+against the blue sky--that odd cultivated corner in the God-forsaken
+little marsh island, given up to sea-gulls and picnickers, of Torcello.
+
+"Poor little Clarence," mused Lady Tal, alluding to the rather
+feeble-minded young millionaire, who had brought them there, five
+gondolas full of women in lilac and pink and straw-coloured frocks,
+and men in white coats, three guitars, a banjo, and two mandolins, and
+the corresponding proportion of table linen, knives and forks, pies,
+bottles, and sweetmeats with crinkled papers round them. "Poor little
+Clarence, he isn't a bad little thing, is he? He wouldn't be bad to a
+woman who married him, would he?"
+
+"He would adore her," answered Jervase Marion, walking up and down that
+orchard by Lady Tal's side. "He would give her everything the heart of
+woman could desire; carriages, horses, and diamonds, and frocks from
+Worth, and portraits by Lenbach and Sargent, and bric-a-brac, and--ever
+so much money for charities, hospitals, that sort of thing----and----and
+complete leisure and freedom and opportunities for enjoying the company
+of men not quite so well off as himself."
+
+Marion stopped short, his hands thrust in his pockets, and with that
+frown which made people think that his boots pinched. He was looking
+down at his boots at this moment, though he was really thinking of that
+famous novel, his, not Lady Tal's; so Lady Tal may have perhaps thought
+it was the boots that made him frown, and speak in a short, cross little
+way. Apparently she thought so, for she took no notice of his looks, his
+intonation, or his speech.
+
+"Yes," she continued musing, striking the ground with her umbrella,
+"he's a good little thing. It's good to bring us all to Torcello, with
+all that food and those guitars, and banjos and things, particularly as
+we none of us throw a word at him in return. And he seems so pleased. It
+shows a very amiable, self-effacing disposition, and that's, after all,
+the chief thing in marriage. But, Lord! how dreary it would be to see
+that man at breakfast, and lunch, and dinner! or if one didn't, merely
+to know that there he must be, having breakfast, lunch and dinner
+somewhere--for I suppose he would have to have them--that man existing
+somewhere on the face of the globe, and speaking of one as 'my wife.'
+Fancy knowing the creature was always smiling, whatever one did, and
+never more jealous than my umbrella. Wouldn't it feel like being one of
+the fish in that tank we saw? Wouldn't living with the Bishop--is he a
+bishop?--of Torcello, in that musty little house with all the lichen
+stains and mosquito nests, and nothing but Attila's throne to call
+upon--be fun compared with that? Yes, I suppose it's wise to marry
+Clarence. I suppose I shall do right in making him marry my cousin. You
+know"--she added, speaking all these words slowly--"I could make him
+marry anybody, because he wants to marry me."
+
+Marion gave a little start as Lady Tal had slowly pronounced those two
+words, "my cousin." Lady Tal noticed it.
+
+"You thought I had contemplated having Clarence myself?" she said,
+looking at the novelist with a whimsical, amused look. "Well, so I have.
+I have contemplated a great many things, and not had the courage to do
+them. I've contemplated going off to Germany, and studying nursing; and
+going off to France, and studying painting; I've contemplated turning
+Catholic, and going into a convent. I've contemplated--well--I'm
+contemplating at present--becoming a _great_ novelist, as you know. I've
+contemplated marrying poor men, and becoming their amateur charwoman;
+and I've contemplated marrying rich men, and becoming--well, whatever a
+penniless woman does become when she marries a rich man; but I've done
+that once before, and once is enough of any experience in life, at least
+for a person of philosophic cast of mind, don't you think? I confess I
+have been contemplating the possibility of marrying Clarence, though I
+don't see my way to it. You see, it's not exactly a pleasant position to
+be a widow and not to be one, as I am, in a certain sense. Also, I'm
+bored with living on my poor husband's money, particularly as I know he
+wished me to find it as inconvenient as possible to do so. I'm bored
+with keeping the capital from that wretched boy and his mother, who
+would get it all as soon as I was safely married again. That's it. As a
+matter of fact I'm bored with all life, as I daresay most people are;
+but to marry this particular Clarence, or any other Clarence that may be
+disporting himself about, wouldn't somehow diminish the boringness of
+things. Do you see?"
+
+"I see," answered Marion. Good Heavens, what a thing it is to be a
+psychological novelist! and how exactly he had guessed at the reality of
+Lady Atalanta's character and situation. He would scarcely venture to
+write that novel of his; he might as well call it _Lady Tal_ at once. It
+was doubtless this discovery which made him grow suddenly very red and
+feel an intolerable desire to say he knew not what.
+
+They continued walking up and down that little orchard, the brown
+maize leaves all around, the bright green and vermilion enamel of the
+pomegranate trees, the Japanese pattern, red and yellow, of the peach
+branches, against the blue sky above.
+
+"My dear Lady Tal," began Marion, "my dear young lady, will you
+allow--an elderly student of human nature to say--how--I fear it must
+seem very impertinent--how thoroughly--taking your whole situation as if
+it were that of a third person--he understanding its difficulties--and,
+taking the situation no longer quite as that of a third person, how
+earnestly he hopes that----"
+
+Marion was going to say "you will not derogate from the real nobility
+of your nature." But only a fool could say such a thing; besides, of
+course, Lady Tal _must_ derogate. So he finished off:
+
+"That events will bring some day a perfectly satisfactory, though
+perhaps unforeseen, conclusion for you."
+
+Lady Tal was paying no attention. She plucked one of the long withered
+peach leaves, delicate, and red, and transparent, like a Chinese visiting
+card, and began to pull it through her fingers.
+
+"You see," she said, "of the income my husband left me, I've been taking
+only as much as seemed necessary--about two thousand a year. I mean
+necessary that people shouldn't see that I'm doing this sort of thing;
+because, after all, I suppose a woman could live on less, though I am
+an expensive woman.--The rest, of course, I've been letting accumulate
+for the heir; I couldn't give it him, for that would have been going
+against my husband's will. But it's rather boring to feel one's keeping
+that boy,--such a nasty young brute as he is--and his horrid mother out
+of all that money, merely by being there. It's rather humiliating, but
+it would be more humiliating to marry another man for his money. And I
+don't suppose a poor man would have me; and perhaps I wouldn't have a
+poor man. Now, suppose I were the heroine of your novel--you know you
+_are_ writing a novel about me, that's what makes you so patient with
+me and _Christina_, you're just walking round, and looking at me----"
+
+"Oh, my dear Lady Tal--how--how can you think such a thing!" gobbled out
+Marion indignantly. And really, at the moment of speaking, he did feel a
+perfectly unprofessional interest in this young lady, and was
+considerably aggrieved at this accusation.
+
+"Aren't you? Well, I thought you were. You see I have novel on the
+brain. Well, just suppose you _were_ writing that novel, with me for
+a heroine, what would you advise me? One has got accustomed to having
+certain things--a certain amount of clothes, and bric-a-brac and horses,
+and so forth, and to consider them necessary. And yet, I think if one
+were to lose them all to-morrow, it wouldn't make much difference. One
+would merely say: 'Dear me, what's become of it all?' And yet I suppose
+one does require them--other people have them, so I suppose it's right
+one should have them also. Other people like to come to Torcello in five
+gondolas with three guitars, a banjo, and lunch, and to spend two hours
+feeding and littering the grass with paper bags; so I suppose one ought
+to like it too. If it's right, I like it. I always conform, you know;
+only it's rather dull work, don't you think, considered as an interest
+in life? Everything is dull work, for the matter of that, except dear
+old _Christina_. What do you think one might do to make things a little
+less dull? But perhaps everything is equally dull----"
+
+Lady Tal raised one of those delicately-pencilled, immensely arched
+eyebrows of hers, with a sceptical little sigh, and looked in front of
+her, where they were standing.
+
+Before them rose the feathery brown and lilac of the little marsh at the
+end of the orchard, long seeding reeds, sere grasses, sea lavender, and
+Michaelmas daisy; and above that delicate bloom, on an unseen strip of
+lagoon, moved a big yellow and brown sail, slowly flapping against the
+blue sky. From the orchard behind, rose at intervals the whirr of a
+belated cicala; they heard the dry maize leaves crack beneath their
+feet.
+
+"It's all very lovely," remarked Lady Tal pensively; "but it doesn't
+somehow fit in properly. It's silly for people like me to come to such a
+place. As a rule, since Gerald's death, I only go for walks in civilized
+places: they're more in harmony with my frocks."
+
+Jervase Marion did not answer. He leaned against the bole of a peach
+tree, looking out at the lilac and brown sea marsh and the yellow sail,
+seeing them with that merely physical intentness which accompanies great
+mental preoccupation. He was greatly moved. He was aware of a fearful
+responsibility. Yet neither the emotion nor the responsibility made him
+wretched, as he always fancied that all emotion or responsibility must.
+
+He seemed suddenly to be in this young woman's place, to feel the
+already begun, and rapid increasing withering-up of this woman's soul,
+the dropping away from it of all real, honest, vital interests. She
+seemed to him in horrible danger, the danger of something like death.
+And there was but one salvation: to give up that money, to make herself
+free----Yes, yes, there was nothing for it but that. Lady Tal, who
+usually struck him as so oppressively grown up, powerful, able to cope
+with everything, affected him at this moment as a something very young,
+helpless, almost childish; he understood so well that during all those
+years this big woman in her stiff clothes, with her inexpressive face,
+had been a mere child in the hands of her brother, that she had never
+thought, or acted, or felt for herself; that she had not lived.
+
+Give up that money; give up that money; marry some nice young fellow
+who will care for you; become the mother of a lot of nice little
+children----The words went on and on in Marion's mind, close to his
+lips; but they could not cross them. He almost saw those children of
+hers, the cut of their pinafores and sailor clothes, the bend of their
+blond and pink necks; and that nice young husband, blond of course, tall
+of course, with vague, regular features, a little dull perhaps, but
+awfully good. It was so obvious, so right. At the same time it seemed
+rather tame; and Marion, he didn't know why, while perceiving its
+extreme rightness and delightfulness, couldn't help wincing a little bit
+at the prospect----
+
+Lady Tal must have been engaged simultaneously in some similar
+contemplation, for she suddenly turned round, and said:
+
+"But after all, anything else might perhaps be just as boring as all
+this. And fancy having given up that money all for nothing; one would
+feel such a fool. On the whole, my one interest in life is evidently
+destined to be _Christina_, and the solution of all my doubts will be
+the appearance of the 'New George Eliot of fashionable life'; don't you
+think that sounds like the heading in one of your American papers, the
+Buffalo _Independent_, or Milwaukee _Republican_?"
+
+Marion gave a little mental start.
+
+"Just so, just so," he answered hurriedly: "I think it would be a fatal
+thing--a very fatal thing for you to--well--to do anything rash, my dear
+Lady Tal. After all, we must remember that there is such a thing as
+habit; a woman accustomed to the life you lead, although I don't deny it
+may sometimes seem dull, would be committing a mistake, in my opinion a
+great mistake, in depriving herself, for however excellent reasons, of
+her fortune. Life is dull, but, on the whole, the life we happen to live
+is usually the one which suits us best. My own life, for instance,
+strikes me at moments, I must confess, as a trifle dull. Yet I should be
+most unwise to change it, most unwise. I think you are quite right in
+supposing that novel-writing, if you persevere in it, will afford you
+a--very--well--a--considerable interest in life."
+
+Lady Tal yawned under her parasol.
+
+"Don't you think it's time for us to go back to the rest of our rabble?"
+she asked. "It must be quite three-quarters of an hour since we finished
+lunch, so I suppose it's time for tea, or food of some sort. Have you
+ever reflected, Mr. Marion, how little there would be in picnics, and in
+life in general, if one couldn't eat a fresh meal every three-quarters
+of an hour?"
+
+
+IX.
+
+Few things, of the many contradictory things of this world, are more
+mysterious than the occasional certainty of sceptical men. Marion was
+one of the most sceptical of sceptical novelists; the instinct that
+nothing really depended upon its supposed or official cause, that
+nothing ever produced its supposed or official effect, that all things
+were always infinitely more important or unimportant than represented,
+that nothing is much use to anything, and the world a mystery and
+a muddle; this instinct, so natural to the psychologist, regularly
+honeycombed his existence, making it into a mere shifting sand, quite
+unfit to carry the human weight. Yet at this particular moment, Marion
+firmly believed that if only Lady Atalanta could be turned into a
+tolerable novelist, the whole problem of Lady Atalanta's existence would
+be satisfactorily solved, if only she could be taught construction,
+style, punctuation, and a few other items; if only one could get into
+her head the difference between a well-written thing, and an ill-written
+thing, then, considering her undoubted talent----for Marion's opinion
+of Lady Tal's talent had somehow increased with a bound. Why he should
+think _Christina_ a more remarkable performance now that he had been
+tinkering at it for six weeks, it is difficult to perceive. He seemed
+certainly to see much more in it. Through that extraordinary difficulty
+of expression, he now felt the shape of a personality, a personality
+contradictory, enigmatical, not sure of itself, groping, as it were,
+to the light. _Christina_ was evidently the real Lady Tal, struggling
+through that overlaying of habits and prejudices which constituted the
+false one.
+
+So, _Christina_ could not be given too much care; and certainly no novel
+was ever given more, both by its author and by its critic. There was
+not a chapter, and scarcely a paragraph, which had not been dissected
+by Marion and re-written by Lady Tal; the critical insight of the one
+being outdone only by the scribbling energy of the other. And now, it
+would soon be finished. There was only that piece about Christina's
+reconciliation with her sister-in-law to get into shape. Somehow or
+other the particular piece seemed intolerably difficult to do; the more
+Lady Tal worked at it, the worse it grew; the more Marion expounded his
+views on the subject, the less did she seem able to grasp them.
+
+They were seated on each side of the big deal table, which, for the
+better development of _Christina_, Lady Tal had installed in her
+drawing-room, and which at this moment presented a lamentable confusion
+of foolscap, of mutilated pages, of slips for gumming on, of gum-pots,
+and scissors. The scissors, however, were at present hidden from view,
+and Lady Tal, stooping over the litter, was busily engaged looking for
+them.
+
+"Confound those beastly old scissors!" she exclaimed, shaking a heap of
+MS. with considerable violence.
+
+Marion, on his side, gave a feeble stir to the mass of paper, and said,
+rather sadly: "Are you sure you left them on this table?"
+
+He felt that something was going wrong. Lady Tal had been unusually
+restive about the alterations he wanted her to make.
+
+"You are slanging those poor scissors because you are out of patience
+with things in general, Lady Tal."
+
+She raised her head, and leaning both her long, well-shaped hands on the
+table, looked full at Marion:
+
+"Not with things in general, but with things in particular. With
+_Christina_, in the first place; and then with myself; and then with
+you, Mr. Marion."
+
+"With me?" answered Marion, forcing out a smile of pseudo-surprise. He
+had felt all along that she was irritated with him this morning.
+
+"With you"--went on the lady, continuing to rummage for the scissors--"with
+you, because I don't think you've been quite fair. It isn't fair to put
+it into an unfortunate creature's head that she is an incipient George
+Eliot, when you know that if she were to slave till doomsday, she couldn't
+produce a novel fit for the _Family Herald_. It's very ungrateful of me
+to complain, but you see it is rather hard lines upon me. You can do all
+this sort of thing as easy as winking, and you imagine that everyone
+else must. You put all your own ideas into poor _Christina_, and you
+just expect me to be able to carry them out, and when I make a hideous
+hash, you're not satisfied. You think of that novel just as if it were
+you writing it--you know you do. Well, then, when a woman discovers at
+last that she can't make the beastly thing any better; that she's been
+made to hope too much, and that too much is asked of her, you understand
+it's rather irritating. I am sick of re-writing that thing, sick of
+every creature in it."
+
+And Lady Tal gave an angry toss to the sheets of manuscript with the
+long pair of dressmaker's scissors, which she had finally unburied.
+Marion felt a little pang. The pang of a clever man who discovers
+himself to be perpetrating a stupidity. He frowned that little frown
+of the tight boots.
+
+Quite true. He saw, all of a sudden, that he really had been
+over-estimating Lady Tal's literary powers. It appeared to him
+monstrous. The thought made him redden. To what unjustifiable lengths
+had his interest in the novel--the novel in the abstract, anybody's
+novel; and (he confessed to himself) the interest in one novel in
+particular, his own, the one in which Lady Tal should figure--led him
+away! Perceiving himself violently to be in the wrong, he proceeded
+to assume the manner, as is the case with most of us under similar
+circumstances (perhaps from a natural instinct of balancing matters)
+of a person conscious of being in the right.
+
+"I think," he said, dryly, "that you have rather overdone this novel,
+Lady Tal--worked at it too much, talked of it too much too, sickened
+yourself with it."
+
+"--And sickened others," put in Lady Atalanta gloomily.
+
+"No, no, no--not others--only yourself, my dear young lady," said Marion
+paternally, in a way which clearly meant that she had expressed the
+complete truth, being a rude woman, but that he, being a polite man,
+could never admit it. As a matter of fact, Marion was not in the least
+sick of _Christina_, quite the reverse.
+
+"You see," he went on, playing with the elastic band of one of the
+packets of MS., "you can't be expected to know these things. But no
+professed novelist--no one of any experience--no one, allow me to say
+so, except a young lady, could possibly have taken such an overdose of
+novel-writing as you have. Why, you have done in six weeks what ought to
+have taken six months! The result, naturally, is that you have lost all
+sense of proportion and quality; you really can't see your novel any
+longer, that's why you feel depressed about it."
+
+Lady Tal was not at all mollified.
+
+"That wasn't a reason for making me believe I was going to be George
+Eliot and Ouida rolled into one, with the best qualities of Goethe and
+Dean Swift into the bargain," she exclaimed.
+
+Marion frowned, but this time internally. He really had encouraged Lady
+Tal quite unjustifiably. He doubted, suddenly, whether she would ever
+get a publisher; therefore he smiled, and remarked gently:
+
+"Well, but--in matters of belief, there are two parties, Lady Tal.
+Don't you think you may be partly responsible for this--this little
+misapprehension?"
+
+Lady Tal did not answer. The insolence of the Ossian was roused. She
+merely looked at Marion from head to foot; and the look was ineffably
+scornful. It seemed to say: "This is what comes of a woman like me
+associating with Americans and novelists."
+
+"I've not lost patience," she said after a moment; "don't think that.
+When I make up my mind to a thing I just do it. So I shall finish
+_Christina_, and print her, and publish her, and dedicate her to you.
+Only, catch me ever writing another novel again!--and"--she added,
+smiling with her closed teeth as she extended a somewhat stiff hand to
+Marion--"catch you reading another novel of mine again either, now that
+you've made all the necessary studies of me for _your_ novel!"
+
+Marion smiled politely. But he ran downstairs, and through the narrow
+little paved lane to the ferry at San Vio with a bent head.
+
+He had been a fool, a fool, he repeated to himself. Not, as he had
+thought before, by exposing Lady Tal to disappointment and humiliation,
+but by exposing himself.
+
+Yes, he understood it all. He understood it when, scarcely out of Lady
+Tal's presence, he caught himself, in the garden, looking up at her
+windows, half expecting to see her, to hear some rather rough joke
+thrown at him as a greeting, just to show she was sorry---- He
+understood it still better, when, every time the waiter knocked in the
+course of the day, he experienced a faint expectation that it might be a
+note from Lady Tal, a line to say: "I was as cross as two sticks, this
+morning, wasn't I?" or merely: "don't forget to come to-morrow."
+
+He understood. He and the novel, both chucked aside impatiently by
+this selfish, capricious, imperious young aristocrat: the two things
+identified, and both now rejected as unworthy of taking up more of her
+august attention! Marion felt the insult to the novel--her novel--almost
+more than to himself. After all, how could Lady Tal see the difference
+between him and the various mashers of her acquaintance, perceive that
+he was the salt of the earth? She had not wherewithal to perceive it.
+But that she should not perceive the dignity of her own work, how
+infinitely finer that novel was than herself, how it represented all
+her own best possibilities; that she should be ungrateful for the
+sensitiveness with which he had discovered its merit, _her_ merits, in
+the midst of that confusion of illiterate fashionable rubbish----
+
+And when that evening, having his coffee at St. Mark's, he saw Lady
+Tal's stately figure, her white dress, amongst the promenaders in the
+moonlight, a rabble of young men and women at her heels, it struck him
+suddenly that something was over. He thought that, if Lady Tal came to
+London next spring, he would not call upon her unless sent for; and he
+was sure she would not send for him, for as to _Christina_, _Christina_
+would never get as far as the proof-sheets; and unless _Christina_
+re-appeared on the surface, he also would remain at the bottom.
+
+Marion got up from his table, and leaving the brightly illuminated
+square and the crowd of summer-like promenaders, he went out on to the
+Riva, and walked slowly towards the arsenal. The contrast was striking.
+Out here it looked already like winter. There were no chairs in front of
+the cafes, there were scarcely any gondola-lights at the mooring places.
+The passers-by went along quickly, the end of their cloak over their
+shoulder. And from the water, which swished against the marble landings,
+came a rough, rainy wind. It was dark, and there were unseen puddles
+along the pavement.
+
+This was the result of abandoning, for however little, one's principles.
+He had broken through his convictions by accepting to read a young
+lady's MS. novel. It did not seem a very serious mistake. But through
+that chink, what disorderly powers had now entered his well-arranged
+existence!
+
+What the deuce did he want with the friendship of a Lady Tal? He had
+long made up his mind to permit himself only such friendship as could
+not possibly involve any feeling, as could not distress or ruffle him
+by such incidents as illness, death, fickleness, ingratitude. The
+philosophy of happiness, of that right balance of activities necessary
+for the dispassionate student of mankind, consisted in never having
+anything that one could miss, in never wanting anything. Had he not long
+ago made up his mind to live contemplative only of external types, if
+not on a column like Simon Stylites, at least in its meaner modern
+equivalent, a top flat at Westminster?
+
+Marion felt depressed, ashamed of his depression, enraged at his shame;
+and generally intolerably mortified at feeling anything at all, and
+still more, in consequence, at feeling all this much.
+
+As he wandered up and down one of the stretches of the Riva, the
+boisterous wind making masts and sails creak, and his cigar-smoke fly
+wildly about, he began, however, to take a little comfort. All this,
+after all, was so much experience; and experience was necessary for the
+comprehension of mankind. It was preferable, as a rule, to use up other
+people's experience; to look down, from that top flat at Westminster,
+upon grief and worry and rage _in corpore vili_, at a good five storeys
+below one. But, on reflection, it was doubtless necessary occasionally
+to get impressions a little nearer; the very recognition of feeling in
+others presupposed a certain minimum of emotional experience in oneself.
+
+Marion had a sense of humour, a sense of dignity, and a corresponding
+aversion to being ridiculous. He disliked extremely having played the
+part of the middle-aged fool. But if ever he should require, for a
+future novel, a middle-aged fool, why, there he would be, ready to hand.
+And really, unless he had thus miserably broken through his rules of
+life, thus contemptibly taken an interest in a young lady six-foot
+high, the daughter of a bankrupt earl, with an inexpressive face and a
+sentimental novel, he would never, never have got to fathom, as he now
+fathomed, the character of the intelligent woman of the world, with
+aspirations ending in frivolity, and a heart entirely rusted over by
+insolence.
+
+Ah, he _did_ understand Lady Tal. He had gone up to his hotel; and shut
+his window with a bang, receiving a spout of rain in his face, as he
+made that reflection. Really, Lady Tal might be made into something
+first-rate.
+
+He threw himself into an arm-chair and opened a volume of the
+correspondence of Flaubert.
+
+
+X.
+
+"I am glad to have made an end of _Christina_," remarked Lady Tal,
+when they were on Miss Vanderwerf's balcony together. _Christina_ had
+been finished, cleaned up, folded, wrapped in brown paper, stringed,
+sealing-waxed and addressed to a publisher, a week almost ago. During
+the days separating this great event from this evening, the last of Lady
+Atalanta's stay in Venice, the two novelists had met but little. Lady
+Tal had had farewell visits to pay, farewell dinners and lunches to eat.
+So had Jervase Marion; for, two days after Lady Tal's return to her
+apartment near the Holy Apostles at Rome, he would be setting out for
+that dear, tidy, solitary flat at Westminster.
+
+"I am glad to have made an end of _Christina_," remarked Lady Tal, "it
+had got to bore me fearfully."
+
+Marion winced. He disliked this young woman's ingratitude and brutality.
+It was ill-bred and stupid; and of all things in the world, the novelist
+from Alabama detested ill-breeding and stupidity most. He was angry
+with himself for minding these qualities in Lady Tal. Had he not long
+made up his mind that she possessed them, _must_ possess them?
+
+There was a pause. The canal beneath them was quite dark, and the room
+behind quite light; it was November, and people no longer feared lamps
+on account of mosquitoes, any more than they went posting about in
+gondolas after illuminated singing boats. The company, also, was
+entirely collected within doors; the damp sea-wind, the necessity for
+shawls and overcoats, took away the Romeo and Juliet character from
+those little gothic balconies, formerly crowded with light frocks and
+white waistcoats.
+
+The temperature precluded all notions of flirtation; one must intend
+business, or be bent upon catching cold, to venture outside.
+
+"How changed it all is!" exclaimed Lady Tal, "and what a beastly place
+Venice does become in autumn. If I were a benevolent despot, I should
+forbid any rooms being let or hotels being opened beyond the 15th of
+October. I wonder why I didn't get my bags together and go earlier!
+I might have gone to Florence or Perugia for a fortnight, instead of
+banging straight back to Rome. Oh, of course, it was all along of
+_Christina_! What were we talking about? Ah, yes, about how changed
+it all was. Do you remember the first evening we met here, a splendid
+moonlight, and ever so hot? When was it? Two months ago? Surely more.
+It seems years ago. I don't mean merely on account of the change of
+temperature, and leaving off cotton frocks and that: I mean we seem to
+have been friends so long. You will write to me sometimes, won't you,
+and send any of your friends to me? Palazzo Malaspini, Santi Apostoli
+(just opposite the French Embassy, you know), after five nearly always,
+in winter. I wonder," continued Lady Tal, musingly, leaning her tweed
+elbow on the damp balustrade, "whether we shall ever write another novel
+together; what do you think, Mr. Marion?"
+
+Something seemed suddenly to give away inside Marion's soul. He saw, all
+at once, those big rooms, which he had often heard described (a woman of
+her means ought to be ashamed of such furniture, the Roumanian Princess
+had remarked), near the Holy Apostles at Rome: the red damask walls, the
+big palms and azaleas, with pieces of embroidery wrapped round the pots,
+the pastel of Lady Tal by Lenbach, the five hundred photographs dotted
+about, and fifteen hundred silver objects of indeterminable shape
+and art, and five dozen little screens all covered with odd bits of
+brocade--of course there was all that: and the door curtain raised, and
+the butler bowing in, and behind him the whitish yellowish curl, and
+pinky grey face of Clarence. And then he saw, but not more distinctly,
+his writing-table at Westminster, the etchings round his walls, the
+collection of empty easy-chairs, each easier and emptier, with its
+book-holding or leg-stretching apparatus, than its neighbor. He became
+aware of being old, remarkably old, of a paternal position towards this
+woman of thirty. He spoke in a paternal tone--
+
+"No!" he answered, "I think not. I shall be too busy. I must write
+another novel myself."
+
+"What will your novel be about?" asked Lady Tal, slowly, watching her
+cigarette cut down through the darkness into the waters below. "Tell
+me."
+
+"My novel? What will my novel be about?" repeated Marion, absently. His
+mind was full of those red rooms at Rome, with the screens, and the
+palms, and odious tow-coloured head of Clarence. "Why, my novel will
+be the story of an old artist, a sculptor--I don't mean a man of the
+Renaissance, I mean old in years, elderly, going on fifty--who was silly
+enough to imagine it was all love of art which made him take a great
+deal of interest in a certain young lady and her paintings----"
+
+"You said he was a sculptor just now," remarked Lady Tal calmly.
+
+"Of course I meant in her statues--modelling--what d'you call it----"
+
+"And then?" asked Lady Tal after a pause, looking down into the canal.
+"What happened?"
+
+"What happened?" repeated Marion, and he heard his own voice with
+surprise, wondering how it could be his own, or how he could know it
+for his, so suddenly had it grown quick and husky and unsteady--"What
+happened? Why--that he made an awful old fool of himself. That's all."
+
+"That's all!" mused Lady Tal. "Doesn't it seem rather lame? You don't
+seem to have got sufficient _denouement_, do you? Why shouldn't we
+write that novel together? I'm sure I could help you to something more
+conclusive than that. Let me see. Well, suppose the lady were to answer:
+'I am as poor as a rat, and I fear I'm rather expensive. But I _can_
+make my dresses myself if only I get one of those wicker dolls, I call
+them Theresa, you know; and I _might_ learn to do my hair myself; and
+then I'm going to be a great painter--no, sculptor, I mean--and make
+pots of money; so suppose we get married.' Don't you think Mr. Marion,
+that would be more _modern_ than your _denouement_? You would have to
+find out what that painter--no, sculptor, I beg your pardon--would
+answer. Consider that both he and the lady are rather lonely, bored,
+and getting into the sere and yellow---- We ought to write that novel
+together, because I've given you the ending--and also because I really
+can't manage another all by myself, now that I've got accustomed to
+having my semicolons put in for me----"
+
+As Lady Atalanta spoke these words, a sudden downpour of rain drove her
+and Marion back into the drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+A WORLDLY WOMAN.
+
+
+I.
+
+"But why should you mind who buys your pots, so long as your pots are
+beautiful?" asked the girl.
+
+"Because as things exist at present, art can minister only to the
+luxury of the rich, idle classes. The people, the people that works and
+requires to play, and requires something to tell it of happier things,
+gets no share in art. The people is too poor to possess beautiful
+things, and too brutish to care for them: the only amusement it can
+afford is getting drunk. And one wearies and sickens of merely adding
+one's grain of sand to the inequality and injustice of existing social
+conditions--don't you see, Miss Flodden?"
+
+Leonard Greenleaf stopped short, his breathlessness mingling with the
+annoyance at having let himself be carried away by his ideas, and
+producing a vague sense of warm helplessness.
+
+"Of course," he went on, taking up a big jar of yellow Hispano-Moorish
+lustre ware, and mechanically dusting it with the feather brush, "it's
+absurd to talk like that about such things as pots, and it's absurd to
+talk like that to you."
+
+And raising his head he gave a furtive little glare at the girl, where
+she stood in a golden beam of dust and sunlight, which slanted through
+his workshop.
+
+Miss Valentine Flodden--for such was the name on the family card which
+she had sent in together with that of Messrs. Boyce--made rather a
+delightful picture in that yellow halo: the green light from under the
+plane trees filtering in through the door behind her, and gleams of
+crimson and glints of gold flickering, in the brown gloom wherever an
+enamel plate or pot was struck by a sunbeam, winnowed by the blind which
+flapped in the draught. Greenleaf knew by some dim, forgotten experience
+or unaccountable guess-work, that she was what was called, in the
+detestable jargon of a certain set, a pretty woman. He also recognised
+in her clothes--they were would-be manly, far more simple and practical
+than those of the girls he knew, yet telling of a life anything but
+practical and simple--that she belonged to that same set of persons;
+a fact apparent also in her movements, her words and accent, nay in
+the something indefinable in her manner which seemed to take things
+for granted. But he didn't care for her being beautiful. His feeling
+was solely of vague irritation at having let himself speak--he had
+quite unnecessarily told her he intended giving up the pottery next
+year--about the things which were his very life, to a stranger; a
+stranger who had come with a card to ask advice about her own amateur
+work, and from out of a world which was foreign and odious to him, the
+world of idleness and luxury. Also, he experienced slight shame at
+a certain silly, half-romantic pleasure at what was in reality the
+unconscious intrusion of a fashionable eccentric. This girl, who had
+been sent on from Boyce & Co.'s for information which they could not
+give, must evidently have thought she was coming to another shop,
+otherwise she would never have come all alone; she evidently took him
+for a shopman, otherwise she would not have staid so long nor spoken
+so freely. It was much better she should continue to regard him as a
+shopman; and indeed was it not his pride to have shaken off all class
+distinctions, and to have become a workingman like any other?
+
+It was this thought which made him alter his tone and ask with grave
+politeness, "Is there any further point upon which I can have the
+pleasure of giving you any information?"
+
+Miss Flodden did not answer this question. She stood contemplating the
+old warped oaken floor, on whose dust she was drawing a honeysuckle
+pattern with the end of her parasol.
+
+"Why did you say that you ought not to speak about such things
+to--people, Mr. Greenleaf?" she asked. "Of course, one's a Philistine,
+and in outer darkness, but still----"
+
+She had raised her eyes full upon him. They were a strange light blue,
+darkening as she spoke, under very level brows, and she had an odd way
+of opening them out at one. Like that, with her delicate complexion, and
+a little vagueness about the mouth, she looked childish, appealing, and
+rather pathetic.
+
+"All these things are very interesting," she added quickly; "at least
+they must be if one understands anything about them."
+
+Greenleaf was sorry. He didn't know exactly why; but he felt vaguely as
+if he had been brutal. He had made her shut up--for he recognised that
+the second part of her speech was the reaction against his own; and that
+was brutal. He ought not to have let the conversation depart from the
+technicalities of pottery, as he had done by saying he intended giving
+it up, and then bursting into that socialistic rhapsody. It wasn't fair
+upon her.
+
+By this time the reaction had completely set in with her. Her face had a
+totally different expression, indifferent, bored, a little insolent--the
+expression of her society and order.
+
+"It's been very good of you," she said, looking vaguely round the room,
+with the shimmer of green leaves and the glint of enamel in its brown
+dustiness, "to tell me so many things, and to have given up so much
+of your time. I didn't know, you know, from Messrs. Boyce, that I was
+breaking in upon you at your work. I suppose they were so kind because
+of my father having a collection--they thought that I knew more about
+pottery than I do."
+
+She stretched out her hand stiffly. Leonard Greenleaf did not know
+whether he ought to take it, because he guessed that she did not know
+whether she ought to offer it him. Also he felt awkward, and sorry to
+have shut her up.
+
+"I should--be very happy to tell you anything more that I could, Miss
+Flodden," he said; "besides, the owners of Yetholme must be privileged
+people with us potters."
+
+"If--if ever you be passing anywhere near Eaton Square--that's where I
+live with my aunt," she said, "won't you come in and have a cup of tea?
+Number 5; the number is on the card. But," she added suddenly, with a
+little laugh, which was that social stiffening once more, "perhaps you
+never do pass anywhere near tea-time; or you pass and don't come in. It
+would be a great waste of your time."
+
+What had made her stiffen suddenly like that was a faint smile which had
+come into Greenleaf's face at the beginning of her invitation. He had
+understood, or thought he understood, that his visitor had grasped the
+fact of his being a sort of gentleman after all, and that she thought it
+necessary to express her recognition of the difference between him and
+any other member of the firm of Boyce & Co. by asking him to call.
+
+"Of course you are a great deal too busy," she repeated. "Perhaps
+some day you will let me come to your studio again--some day next
+year--good-bye."
+
+"Shall I call you a hansom?" he asked, wondering whether he had been
+rude.
+
+"Thank you; I think I'll go by the Underground. You cross the big
+square, and then along the side of the British Museum, don't you? I made
+a note of the way as I came. Or else I'll get a 'bus in Tottenham Court
+Road."
+
+She spoke the words _'bus_ and _Underground_, he thought, with a little
+emphasis. She was determined to have her fill of eccentricity, now that
+she had gone in for pottery, and for running about all alone to strange
+places, and scoring out everything save her own name on the family card.
+At least so Greenleaf said to himself, as he watched the tall, slight
+young figure disappearing down the black Bloomsbury street, and among
+the green leaves and black stems of the Bloomsbury square. An unlikely
+apparition, oddly feminine in its spruce tailoring, in that sleepy part
+of the world, whence fashion had retreated long, long ago, with the last
+painted coach which had rumbled through the iron gates, and the last
+link which had been extinguished in the iron extinguishers of the rusty
+areas.
+
+
+II.
+
+Greenleaf had a great disbelief in his own intuitions; perhaps because
+he vibrated unusually to the touch of other folks' nature, and that the
+number and variety of his impressions sometimes made it difficult to
+come to a cut-and-dry conclusion. There was in him also a sensitiveness
+on the subject of his own beliefs and ideals which made him instinctively
+avoid contact with other folk, and avoid even knowing much about them.
+He often felt that in a way he was very unfit to be a Socialist and an
+agitator; for besides the absurd attraction that everything beautiful,
+distinguished, exotic, exercised upon him, and a corresponding repugnance
+to the coarse and sordid sights of the world, he knew himself to look at
+people in an excessively subjective way, never seeking spontaneously to
+understand what they themselves were trying to do and say, but analysing
+them merely from the series of impressions which he received. Just as
+his consciousness of being a born aesthete and aristocrat had pushed
+him into social questions and democratic views; so also his extreme
+conscientiousness occasionally made him attempt, rather abortively,
+to behave to others as he might wish to be behaved to himself, his
+imagination being taxed to the utmost by the inquiry as to what
+behaviour would be altruistic and just under the circumstances.
+
+This preamble is necessary to explain various inconsistencies in our
+hero's conduct, and more particularly at this moment, the inconsistency
+of suddenly veering round in his suppositions about Miss Valentine
+Flodden. In his monotonous life of artistic work and social study--in
+those series of quiet days, as like one another as the rows of black
+Bloomsbury houses with their garlanded door-lintels and worn-out
+doorsteps, as the spear-heads of the railings, the spikes of blossom on
+the horse-chestnuts, and the little lions on the chain curbs round the
+British Museum--the weekly firing of his pottery kiln at Boyce's Works
+near Wandsworth, the weekly lecture to workingmen down at Whitechapel,
+the weekly reception in the sooty rooms of Faber, the Socialist poet
+and critic who had married the Socialist painter--all these were the
+landmarks of Greenleaf's existence, and landmarks of the magnitude of
+martello towers along a sea-shore. So that anything at all unexpected
+became, in his life of subversive thoughts and methodical activity, an
+incident and an adventure.
+
+Thus it was that the visit of Miss Flodden, although he repeatedly noted
+its utter unimportance to himself and everyone else, became the theme of
+much idle meditation in the intervals of his work and study. He
+felt it as extraordinarily strange. And feeling it in this way, his
+conscientious good sense caused him to analyse it as sometimes almost
+unusually commonplace.
+
+It was in consequence of repeatedly informing himself that after all
+nothing could be more natural than this visit, that he took the step
+which brought him once more into contact with the eccentricity of the
+adventure. For he repeated so often to himself how natural it was that
+a girl with a taste for art should care for pottery (particularly as
+her father owned the world-famous Yetholme collection), and caring for
+pottery should go for information to Messrs. Boyce's the decorators, and
+being referred by Boyce's to himself should come on, at once, and quite
+alone, to the studio of his unknown self; he identified Miss Flodden so
+completely with any one of the mature maidens who carried their peacock
+blue and sage green and amber beads, and interest in economics, archaeology
+and so forth freely through his world, that he decided to give Miss
+Flodden the assistance which he would have proffered to one of the
+independent and studious spinsters of Bloomsbury and West Kensington.
+Accordingly he took a sheet of paper with "Boyce & Co., Decorators,"
+stamped at the head of it, and wrote a note directed to Miss Valentine
+Flodden, Eaton Square, saying that as she would doubtless be interested
+in examining the Rhodian and Damascene pottery of the British Museum,
+which she had told him she knew very imperfectly, he ventured to enclose
+an introduction to the Head of the Department, whom she would find a
+most learned and amiable old gentleman; the fact of her connection with
+the famous Yetholme collection would, for the rest, be introduction
+enough in itself.
+
+After posting the note and the enclosure, Leonard Greenleaf reflected,
+with some wonder and a little humiliation, that he had chosen a sheet of
+Boyce's business paper to write to Miss Flodden; while he had selected a
+sheet with the name of his old Oxford college for writing to the Head of
+the Department. But it was not childish contradictoriness after all; at
+least so he told himself. For old Colonel Hancock Dunstan (one never
+dropped the Colonel even in one's thoughts) had a weakness in favour of
+polite society and against new-fangled democracy, and liked Greenleaf
+exactly because he had better shaped hands and a better cut coat than
+other men who haunted the Museum. And as to Miss Flodden, why, it seemed
+more appropriate to keep things on the level of pottery and decoration,
+and therefore to have Boyce & Co. well to the fore.
+
+Greenleaf had made up his mind that Fate would never again bring him
+face to face with Miss Flodden, and that he would certainly take no
+steps towards altering Fate's intentions. It was for this very reason
+that he had introduced the lady to his old friend of the Museum: for it
+is singular how introducing someone to somebody else keeps up the sense
+of the someone's presence; and how, occasionally, one insists upon such
+vicarious company. But, as stated already, he never dreamed, at least he
+thought he never dreamed, to see his eccentric young visitor again.
+
+Such being the case, it might seem odd, had not his experience of human
+feelings destroyed all perception of oddity, that Greenleaf experienced
+no surprise when, obeying a peremptory scrawl from the former terror
+of Pashas and the present terror of scholars, he found himself one
+afternoon in Colonel Dunstan's solemn bachelor drawing-room, and in the
+presence once more of Miss Valentine Flodden.
+
+Colonel Hancock Dunstan, who in his distant days had gone to Mecca
+disguised as a pilgrim, dug up Persian temples, slain uncivil Moslems
+with his own hand, and altogether constituted a minor Eastern question
+in his one boisterous self, had now settled down (a Government post
+having been created expressly to keep him quiet) into a life divided
+between furious archaeological disputes and faithful service of the
+fair sex. He was at this moment promenading his shrunken person--which
+somehow straightened out into military vigour in the presence of young
+ladies--round a large table spread with innumerable cups of tea, plates
+of strawberries and dishes of bonbons. Of this he partook only in
+the spirit, offering it all, together with the service of a severe
+housekeeper and a black, barefooted Moor, for the consumption of his
+fair guests. The other guest, indeed, a gaunt and classic female
+archaeologist, habited in peacock plush, was fair only in mind; and
+Colonel Dunstan, devoted as he was to all womankind, was wont to neglect
+such intellectual grace when in the presence of more obvious external
+beauty. Hence, at this moment, the poor archaeological lady, accustomed
+to a shower of invitations to lunch, tea, dinner, and play-tickets from
+the gallant though terrible old man, was abandoned to the care of the
+housekeeper until she could be passed over to that of Greenleaf. And
+Colonel Dunstan, with his shrunken tissues and shrunken waistcoat
+regaining a martial ampleness, as the withered rose of Dr. Heidegger's
+experiment regained colour and perfume in the basin of Elixir of Youth,
+was wandering slowly about (for he never sat still) heaping food and
+conversation on Miss Flodden. He was informing her, among anecdotes
+of dead celebrities, reminiscences of Oriental warfare, principles
+of Persian colour arrangement, and panegyrics of virtuous incipient
+actresses, that Greenleaf was a capital fellow, although he would
+doubtless have been improved by military training; a scholar, and
+the son of a great scholar (Thomas Greenleaf's great edition of the
+"Mahabarata," which she should read some day when he, Colonel Dunstan,
+taught her Sanskrit), and that, for the rest, philanthropy, socialism,
+and the lower classes were a great mistake, of which the Ancient
+Persians would have made very short work indeed. To Greenleaf also
+he conveyed sundry information, not troubling to make it quite
+intelligible, for Colonel Dunstan considered that young men ought to be
+taught their place, which place was nowhere. So from various mutterings
+and ejaculations addressed to Miss Flodden, such as, "Ah, your great
+aunt, the duchess--what a woman she was! she had the shoulders of the
+Venus of Milo--I always told her she ought to ride out in the desert to
+excavate Palmyra with me;" and "that dear little cousin of yours--why
+didn't she let me teach her Arabic?" it became gradually apparent to
+Greenleaf that the old gentleman, who seemed as versed in Burke's
+Peerage and Baronetage as in cuneiform inscriptions, had known many
+generations of ladies of the house of Flodden. Nay, most unexpected of
+all, that the young lady introduced by Greenleaf had been a familiar
+object to the learned and hot-tempered Colonel ever since she had left
+the nursery. Greenleaf experienced a slight pang on this discovery:
+he had forgotten, in his own unworldliness, that worldly people like
+Colonel Dunstan and Miss Flodden probably moved in the same society.
+
+"And your sister, how is she?" went on the old gentleman; "is she as
+bright as ever, now she is married, and has she got that little _air
+mutin_ still? It's months since I've seen her; why didn't you bring her
+with you, my dear? And does _she_ also take an interest in Rhodian pots,
+the dear, beautiful creature?"
+
+Miss Flodden's face darkened as he slowly spun out his questions.
+
+"I don't know what my sister is doing. I don't live with her any longer,
+Colonel Dunstan; and she is always busy rushing about with people; and
+I'm busy with pots and practising the fiddle; I've turned hermit since
+quite a long time."
+
+"Well, well, practising the fiddle isn't a bad thing; Orpheus with his
+lute, you know. But you'd much better let me teach you Greek, my dear,
+and come to Asia Minor next winter with me. Lady Betty's coming, and
+we'll see what we can dig up among those sots of Turks. You can get
+capital tents at that fellow's--what's his name--in Piccadilly. And how
+are your people? I saw your brother Herbert the other day at a sale. He
+told me your father was determined not to let us have your collection,
+more's the pity! And what's become of that nice young fellow, Hermann
+Struwe, who used to be at your house? He hasn't got a wife yet, eh?"
+
+Miss Flodden took no notice of these questions. She passed them over in
+disdainful silence, Greenleaf thought, till she suddenly said coldly:
+
+"I should think Mr. Struwe will have no more difficulty in finding a
+wife than in hiring a shooting, or buying a sham antique."
+
+She was a very beautiful woman, Greenleaf said to himself. She was very
+tall (Greenleaf wondered whether the women of that lot, of the idlers,
+were always a head taller than those of his acquaintance), and slender
+almost to thinness, with a rigid, undeveloped sort of grace which
+contrasted with the extreme composure--that sort of taking things for
+granted--of her manner. Old Mr. Dunstan had just alluded to her mother
+having been a Welshwoman; and Greenleaf thought he saw very plainly the
+Celt in this superficially Saxon-looking girl. That sharp perfection
+of feature--features almost over-much chiselled and finished in every
+minutest detail--that excessive mobility of mouth and eyes, did not
+belong to the usual kind of English pretty women. She was so much of
+a Celt, despite her Northumbrian name, that the pale-brown of her
+hair--hair crisp and close round her ears--gave him almost the impression
+of a wig; underneath it must really be jet black.
+
+Notwithstanding a slight weariness at Colonel Dunstan's social
+reminiscences and questions, she seemed pleased and rather excited at
+finding herself in the sanctuary of his learning. While quietly taking
+care of the old gentleman, and much concerned lest he should stumble
+over chairs and footstools in his polite haverings, she let her eyes
+ramble over the expanse of books which covered the walls, evidently
+impressed by all that must be in them. And from the timid though
+pertinacious fashion in which she questioned him, it was clear that she
+thought him an oracle, although an oracle rather difficult to keep to
+the point.
+
+"And now," she finally said, with a little suppressed desperation,
+"won't you show me some of the Rhodian ware, Colonel Dunstan? It would
+be so awfully good of you."
+
+Colonel Dunstan suddenly unwrinkled himself with considerable
+importance. He had forgotten the Rhodian ware, and rather resented its
+existence. Why, bless you! _He_ didn't possess such things as pots; and
+as to going to the Museum, it was the most cold-taking place in the
+world. He would show her his books some day, and the casts of the
+cuneiform inscriptions. She must come to tea again soon with him. Did
+she know Miss Tilly Tandem, who had just been engaged by Irving? He
+should like them to meet. That was her photograph.
+
+"But," said Miss Flodden--Val Flodden it appeared she was called--"mayn't
+I--couldn't I--be allowed to see those Rhodian pots also?" She was
+dreadfully crestfallen, and had a little disappointed eagerness, like a
+child.
+
+"Of course you can," Colonel Dunstan answered, with infinite disdain.
+"_I_ don't think anything of Rhodian ware, you know--mere debased copy
+of the old Persian. Those Greeks of the islands were a poor lot, then as
+now. Believe me, those Greeks have always been a set of confounded liars
+and their account of Salamis will be set right some day. But if you want
+to see it, why of course you can. Greenleaf, take Miss Val Flodden to
+see the Rhodian ware some day soon; do you hear, Greenleaf, eh?"
+
+"Yes, sir." Greenleaf had always said sir to Colonel Dunstan, like a
+little boy, or a subordinate. It made up for a kind of contempt with
+which the learned, but worldly and hot-tempered old gentleman very
+unreasonably inspired him. Greenleaf was full of prejudices, like all
+very gentle and apostolic persons.
+
+"There's Greenleaf--go with him some morning," said Colonel Dunstan,
+regaining his temper; "but, bless me! Why haven't you had any more
+strawberries, Miss Val?"
+
+
+III.
+
+The discovery that he had introduced two people who had already been
+acquainted for years, depressed Greenleaf with something more than the
+mere sense of slight comicality. Indeed, Greenleaf, like many apostolic
+persons, was deficient in the sense of the comic, and destitute of all
+fear of social solecisms. As he waited under the portico of the Museum,
+the pigeons fluttering from the black temple frieze on to the sooty
+steps, and the rusty students pressing through the swinging glass doors,
+he felt a vague dissatisfaction--the sort of faint crossness common in
+children, and of which no contact with the world, the contact with its
+grating or planing powers, had cured this dreamer; but such crossness
+leaves in the candid mind a doubt of possible vicariousness, of being
+caused by something not its ostensible reason, or being caused by the
+quite undefinable. When at last, from out of the blue haze and gauzy
+blackness of the Bloomsbury summer, there emerged an object of interest,
+and the slender recognised figure detached itself from the crowd of
+unreal other creatures, on foot, in cabs, and behind barrows, he was
+aware of a certain flat and prosaic quality in things since that
+tea-party at Colonel Dunstan's. And he was very angry with himself, and
+consequently with everything else, when it struck him suddenly that
+perhaps he was annoyed at the little eccentric adventure--the adventure
+of the lady dropped from the clouds and never seen again--turning into
+a humdrum acquaintance, which might even linger on, with a girl about
+whose family he now knew everything, who, on her side, was now certain
+that he was a gentleman, and who did really and seriously intend to find
+out all about pots.
+
+They walked quickly upstairs, exchanging very few words, save on the
+subject of umbrellas and umbrella tickets; and when they had arrived in
+the pottery room, they became wonderfully business-like. Miss Flodden
+was business-like simply because she was extraordinarily interested
+in the matter in hand; and Greenleaf was business-like because he was
+ashamed of having perhaps thought about Miss Flodden apart from pottery,
+and therefore most anxious, for his own moral dignity, to look at her
+and pottery as indissolubly connected.
+
+As the narrator of this small history is unhappily an ignoramus on the
+subject of pottery, prudence forbids all attempt to repeat the questions
+of Miss Flodden and the answers of Greenleaf on the subject of clay,
+colours, fixing glaze and similar mysteries. These were duly discussed
+for some time while the patient assistant unlocked case after case, and
+let them handle the great Hispano-Moorish dishes, heraldic creatures
+spreading wings among their arabesques of yellow brown goldiness; the
+rotund vases and ewers where Roman consuls and Jewish maidens and Greek
+gods were crowded together, yellow and green and brown, on the deep
+sea-blue of Castel Durante and Gubbio majolica; the fanciful scalloped
+blue upon blue nymphs and satyrs of seventeenth century Savona, which
+looked as if the very dishes and plates had wished to wear furbelows and
+perukes; and the precious pieces, cracked and broken, of Brusa tiles and
+Rhodian and Damascene platters, with the gorgeous crimson tulips--opening
+vistas of Oriental bean-fields--and fantastic green and blue fritillaries
+standing almost in relief on the thick white glaze.
+
+"I suppose it's being brought up among the Yetholme collection that makes
+you know so much about pottery?" remarked Greenleaf, in considerable
+surprise: "you haven't been to this part of the Museum before?"
+
+Miss Flodden raised her pale blue luminous eyes.
+
+"Do you know, I've never been to the Museum since I was a tiny girl, at
+least, except once, when my married sister conducted a party of New York
+friends. I thought we were going to see stuffed birds, and I was so
+surprised to see all those beautiful Greek things--I had seen statues
+once when we went to Rome--I wanted so much to look at them a little,
+but my friends thought they weren't in good repair, and wanted to have
+tea and go to the park, so they scooted me round among the Egyptian
+things and the reading rooms and out by the door. Yes, the little I know
+I have learned by playing with our things at home. Some day you must see
+them, Mr. Greenleaf."
+
+Greenleaf did not answer for a moment. Good heavens! here was a young
+woman of twenty-four or twenty-five who had spent part of every year of
+her life in London, and had been only once to the British Museum, and
+then had expected to see stuffed birds! And the girl apparently an
+instinctive artist, extraordinarily quick and just in her appreciations.
+
+Then there were other things to do, besides opening galleries on Sundays
+and promenading East-end workmen in company with young men from Toynbee
+Hall! And Greenleaf's heart withered--as one's mouth withers at the
+contact of strong green tea or caper sauce--with indignation at all the
+waste of intellectual power and intellectual riches implied in this
+hideous present misarrangement of all things. Was it possible that the
+so-called upper classes, or at least some members thereof, were in one
+way as much the victims of injustice and barbarism as the lower classes,
+off whose labour they basely subsisted?
+
+The thought came over him as his eyes met Miss Flodden's face--that
+delicately chiselled, mobile young face which was suddenly contracted
+with a smile of cynical, yet resigned bitterness. He made that reflection
+once more, when with the wand-bearing custodian imperturbably occupying
+the only seat in the place, they leaned upon the glass case, and she
+asked him, and he told her, about the various currents in art history--the
+form element of ancient Greece, the colour element of the Orientals,
+the patterns of Persian ware, the outline figures on Greek and Etruscan
+vases--things which he imagined every child to know, and about which, as
+about Greeks, Orientals, and Etruscans, and Latin and geography and most
+matters, this girl seemed completely ignorant.
+
+"My word," she exclaimed, and that little piece of slang grated horribly
+on Greenleaf's nerves; "how very interesting things are when one knows
+something about them! Do you suppose all things would be equally
+interesting if one knew about them? Or would it only be every now and
+then, just as with other matters, balls, and picnics, and so forth? Or
+does one get interested whenever one does anything as hard as one can,
+like hard riding, or rowing, or playing tennis properly? Some books seem
+so awfully interesting, you know; but there are such a lot of others
+that one would just throw into the fire if they didn't belong to Mudie.
+But somehow a thread seems always to be wanting. It's like trying to
+play a game without knowing the rules. How have you got to know all
+these things, Mr. Greenleaf? I mean all the connections between things;
+and could anybody get the connecting links if they tried, or must one
+have a special vocation?"
+
+Greenleaf was embarrassed how to answer. He really could not realise
+the extraordinary emptiness in this young woman's mind; and at the same
+time he felt strangely touched and indignant, as he did sometimes when
+giving some little street Arab a good thing which it had never eaten
+before, and did not clearly know how to begin eating.
+
+"Have you--have you--never read at all methodically?" he asked. He
+really meant, "Have you never received any education?"
+
+Miss Flodden reflected for a moment. "No. Somehow one never thought of
+reading as a methodical thing, as a business, you know. Dancing and
+hunting and playing tennis and seeing people, all that's a business,
+because one has to do it. At least one has to do it as long as one
+hadn't turned into a savage; everyone else has to do it. Of course,
+there's the fiddle; I've practised that rather methodically, but it was
+because I liked the sound of the thing so much, and I once had a little
+German--my brother's German crammer for diplomacy--who taught me. And
+then one knew that, unless one got up at five in the morning and did it
+regularly, it wouldn't be done at all. But reading is different. One
+just picks up a book before dinner, or while being dressed. And the
+books are usually such rot."
+
+It was getting late, and Greenleaf conducted Miss Flodden back to her
+parasol, where it was waiting among the vast and shabby umbrellas of
+the studious, very incongruous in its semi-masculine, yet rather futile
+smartness, at the door of the reading-room.
+
+"It is all very beautiful," remarked Miss Flodden, as they descended the
+Museum steps, with the pigeons fluttering all round in the dim, smoky
+air, nodding her head pensively.
+
+"What?" asked Greenleaf. He had an almost conventual hatred of noise
+and bustle, which seemed to him, perhaps because he had elected to work
+among them, the utter profanation of life; and to his aesthetic soul,
+the fact that many thousands of people lived among smoke and smuts, and
+never saw a clear stream, a dainty meadow of grass and daisies, or a sky
+just washed into blueness by a shower, was one of the chief reasons for
+condemning modern industrial civilisation.
+
+"Why, all that--the pale blue mist with the black houses quite soft,
+like black flakes against it, and the green of the trees against the
+black walls, and the moving crowd." Then, as if suddenly taking courage
+to say something rather dreadful, she said: "Tell me about Colonel
+Dunstan. Is he really so learned, does he know such a lot of things?"
+
+Greenleaf laughed at the simplicity with which she asked this. She
+seemed to have a difficulty in realising that anyone could know
+anything.
+
+"Yes, he knows a great lot of things. He is one of the first Orientalists
+in Europe, I believe--at least my father, who was an Oriental scholar
+himself, used to say so; and he is a great archaeologist, besides his
+knowledge of Eastern things, and of course he knows more about Oriental
+art, and in fact all art, than almost anyone."
+
+"Does he know," hesitated Miss Flodden, "what you were telling me about
+the different currents of ancient art, Persian and Greek and Etruscan,
+and the way in which artists lived then--all that you were telling me
+just now?"
+
+Greenleaf laughed. "Good gracious, yes; I know nothing compared with
+him. Why, most of the little I know I learned at his lectures. Shall I
+hail that hansom for you, Miss Flodden?"
+
+They were crossing Bedford Square. The birds were singing in the plane
+trees, and from the open windows of a solemn Georgian house, with its
+courses of white stone, and its classic door frieze, came the notes of
+a sonata of Mozart. All was wonderfully peaceful under the hazy summer
+sky.
+
+"No--not yet. Tell me, then: since Colonel Dunstan knows so many
+interesting things, why in the world does he live like that?"
+
+"Like what, Miss Flodden?"
+
+"Why, as if--well, as if he knew nothing at all. Why does he go every
+afternoon a round of calls on silly women, gossiping about their
+dresses, and listening to all--well--the horrid, because it often
+_is_ horrid, nonsense and filth people talk? I used to meet him about
+everywhere, when I used still to go into the world. He often came to my
+sister's--I thought he was just an old--well, an old creature like the
+rest of them, collecting gossip to retail it next door. Since he really
+knows all about beautiful things, why doesn't he stick to them--why does
+he go about with stupid folk--he must know lots of clever ones?"
+
+"Because--because Colonel Dunstan is a man of the world," answered
+Greenleaf bitterly; "because he cares about art, and history, and
+philosophy, but he also cares for pretty women, and pretty frocks,
+and good manners, and white hands."
+
+"But--why shouldn't one care--doesn't everyone care--for--well, good
+manners?"
+
+He had spoken with such violence that Miss Flodden had turned round. Her
+question died away as she looked into his face. It had hitherto struck
+her merely by its great kindness, and a sort of gentle candour which
+was rare. Now, the clean-shaven features and longish hair gave her the
+impression of a fanatic priest, at least what she imagined such to be.
+
+"In this world, as it now exists," continued Greenleaf in an undertone,
+which was almost a hiss, "things are so divided that a man must choose
+between people who are pretty and pleasant and well-mannered; and people
+who are ugly and brutish and hateful, because the first are idle and
+unjust, and the second overworked and oppressed. Nowadays, more even
+than when Christ taught it, a man cannot serve both God and Mammon; and
+God, at present, at least God's servants, live among the ignorant, and
+dirty, and suffering. Shan't I stop that hansom for you, Miss Flodden?"
+
+"Yes," she answered with a catch in her breath, as if overcome by
+surprise, almost as by an attack.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, closing the flaps of the hansom.
+
+Miss Flodden's hand mechanically dropped on to one of them, and her
+head, with the little black bonnet all points and bows of lace, was
+looking straight into space, as one overcome by great astonishment.
+
+Greenleaf sickened with shame at his vehemence.
+
+"You will let me show you the Etruscan things some day?" he cried, as
+the hansom rolled off.
+
+Ah, could he never, never learn to restrain himself? What business had
+he to talk of such things to such a woman. To let the holy of holies
+become, most likely, a subject of mere idle curiosity and idle talk?
+
+
+IV.
+
+As Greenleaf looked up from the article on the "Rochdale Pioneers
+and Co-operation" and glanced out of the window at the smoke-veiled,
+soot-engrained Northern towns, and the bleak-green North country
+hillsides which flashed past the express, he did not realise at all
+clearly that he was going to see once more Miss Val Flodden, and see
+her in the unexpected relations of hostess and guest.
+
+She had indeed, during their last ramble through the British Museum,
+said something vague about his coming to Yetholme if ever he came
+North; but he had given the invitation no weight and had forgotten it
+completely. His journey was due to a circumstance more important in his
+eyes than the visit of a young lady to his studio, and would be crowned
+by an event far more satisfactory than the meeting with a stray
+acquaintance.
+
+For Sir Percy Flodden had at last decided to sell the famous Yetholme
+collection of majolica and Palissy ware; and the South Kensington
+authorities had selected Leonard Greenleaf, potter and writer on
+pottery, to verify the catalogue and conclude the purchase. It was one
+of Greenleaf's socialist maxims that no important works of art should be
+hidden from public enjoyment in the houses of private collectors; an Act
+of Parliament, in his opinion, should force all owners to sell to the
+nation, supposing that arguments in favour of true citizenship and
+true love of art had failed to make them bestow their property gratis.
+Greenleaf had agitated during several years to induce the public to make
+the first bid for the Yetholme collection; difficulties of all kinds
+had stood in the way, and the owner himself had become restive in the
+negotiations; but now, at last, this immortal earthenware had been saved
+from further private collections and secured for the enjoyment of
+everybody.
+
+This being the case, it was not wonderful if Miss Flodden was thrown
+into the shade by her family collection; and if Greenleaf had gradually
+got to think very little about her of late--I say of late, because until
+the Yetholme sale had diverted his mind from theory to practice, Miss
+Flodden had played a certain part in Greenleaf's thoughts. Her sudden
+intrusion upon the monotony of his existence had made him ponder once
+more upon his undergraduate's dream of reclaiming the upper as well as
+the lower classes; a dream which had gradually vanished before practical
+contact with the pressing want of the poor. He had forgotten, during the
+last five or six years, that the leisured classes existed otherwise than
+as oppressors of the overworked ones. But now there had returned to the
+surface his constitutional craving for harmony, his horror of class
+warfare, a horror all the greater that in this very gentle soul there
+was a possibility of intense hatred. Why should not the whole of society
+work out harmoniously a new and better social order? After all, he
+and his chosen friends belonged to the privileged class, and only
+the privileged class could give the generous initiative required to
+counteract the selfish claiming of rights from below. Mankind was not
+wicked and perverse; and the injustice, wantonness, and cruelty of the
+rich were, doubtless, a result of their ignorance: they must be shown
+that they could do without so many things and that other folk were
+wanting those things so very much. And, half consciously, the image of
+Val Flodden rose up to concentrate and typify the ideas she had evoked.
+She was the living example of the ignorance of all higher right and
+wrong, of all the larger facts of existence, in which the so-called
+upper classes lived on no better than heathen blacks.
+
+In these reflections Greenleaf had never claimed for Miss Flodden any
+individual superiority: to do so would have been to diminish her value
+as a type and an illustration. She had become, in his thoughts,
+the natural woman as produced, or rather as destroyed, by the evil
+constitution of idle society. She appeared, indeed, to have a personal
+charm, but this was doubtless a class peculiarity which his inexperience
+perceived as an individual one. It was the sole business of idle folk,
+Greenleaf said to himself, to make themselves charming, and they
+doubtless carried this quality as high as blacksmiths do strength of
+arm, and sempstresses nimbleness of finger: for the occasional examples
+of idle folk without any charm at all quickly faded from Greenleaf's
+logical memory. Also, he forgot for the moment, that many women, neither
+ignorant nor idle, the three Miss Carpenters for instance, who lived in
+a servantless flat in Holborn and worked in the East End, had as much
+charm, though not quite the same; and that there were tricks of manner
+and speech, affectations of school-boy slang, yokel ways, about Miss
+Flodden herself, which affected his sensitive nerves as ungraceful.
+But, be this as it may, the acquaintance with Miss Flodden had set his
+thoughts on the disadvantages of the upper classes, and he found it
+convenient to use Miss Flodden as an illustration thereof.
+
+Besides, every now and then, Greenleaf had felt, in those long talks
+at the Museum, a curious pang of pity for her. In Greenleaf's nature,
+more thoughtful than logical, the dominating forces were a kind of
+transcendent aestheticism, and an extraordinary, also transcendent,
+compassion--compassion which, coming upon him in veritable stabs, went
+to his head and soon passed the boundaries of individual pain and wrong.
+This man, who aspired towards the future and really hankered painfully
+after the past, was like some mediaeval monk all quivering at the
+sufferings of a far-distant, impersonal Godhead, for the sake of whose
+wrongs he could even hate fiercely, and for the sake of whose more than
+individual sufferings he could feel, every now and then, overwhelming
+pity for some small, ill-treated bird, or beast, or man. That this
+girl--intelligent and good--had been brought up not merely in utter
+indifference to real evil (tempered only by a vague fear of a black man
+who carried you to hell and a much blacker man who turned you out of
+society) but in ignorance of every one of the nobler and more beautiful
+activities of life; this perception of moral and intellectual starvation,
+veiled his mind with tears and made him spiritually choke, like the
+sight of a supperless ragged child, or of a dog that had lost its master.
+
+Such impressions had been common enough in their two or three meetings.
+They had met several times in the Museum, and once at Messrs. Boyce's
+works, the utter unworldliness of Greenleaf's mind preventing his asking
+himself, even once, whether such proceedings did not display unusual
+recklessness on the part of a girl belonging to Miss Flodden's set; so
+much that he did not even take heed of Miss Flodden's occasional remarks
+showing that this liberty, this familiarity with a man and a stranger,
+were possible only because she had deliberately turned her back on her
+former companions. Indifferent to personal matters, he had not even
+understood very plainly (although he had a pleasant, vague sense of
+something similar) that unfamiliarity with the class and type to which
+he belonged had given the girl a sense of absolute safety which allowed
+her to go about and discuss everything with this man from a different
+sphere, as she might have done with another woman. This knowledge was
+vague and scarce conscious, taking the form rather of indignation
+with Miss Flodden's world and pity for Miss Flodden's self, whenever,
+incidentally, she said things which revealed the habit of an opposite
+state of things, the habit of a woman's liberty of action, speech and
+feeling being cramped by disbelief in men's purity and honour, or rather
+by knowledge of their thinly varnished baseness.
+
+Thus it had come about during that dim and delicate London June that
+the young lady from Eaton Square had become a familiar figure in
+the mind, if not in the life, of the Socialist potter of Church Street,
+Bloomsbury. There was, of course, a certain exotic strain in the matter;
+and as they rambled among the solemn sitting Pharaohs, the Roman Emperors
+and headless Greek demigods, and the rows of glass cases in the cool,
+empty Museum, Greenleaf occasionally experienced, while discussing
+various forms of art and describing dead civilisations, a little shock
+of surprise on realising the nature of his companion, on catching every
+now and then an intonation and an expression which told of ball-rooms
+and shooting-houses, on perceiving suddenly, silhouetted against the
+red wall, or reflected in a glass case, the slender, dapper figure in
+its plain, tight clothes; the tight, straight-featured head beneath its
+close little bonnet. But this sense of the unusual and the exotic was
+subdued by the sense of the real, the actually present, just as, in some
+foreign or Eastern town, our disbelief in the possibility of it all is
+oddly moulded into a sort of familiarity by the knowledge that we are
+our ourselves, and ourselves are on the spot.
+
+It was different now; as his train jogged slowly along the banks of the
+Tweed, between the bare, green hills and the leafy little ravines of
+Northumberland. A couple of months' separation had gradually reduced
+Miss Flodden to an unfamiliar, and almost an abstract being. She was
+the subject no longer of impressions, but merely of reflections; and
+of reflections which had grown daily more general, as the perfume of
+individuality faded away. Greenleaf lived so much more in his thoughts
+than in his life that creatures very speedily got to represent nothing
+but problems to him. At this moment his main interest in life was to
+secure the Yetholme collection of majolica and Palissy work; the fact
+that he was going, in a few minutes, to meet Miss Flodden was not more
+important than the fact that he would have to get his portmanteau out
+of the van. And as to Miss Flodden, she represented to him, in a rather
+rubbed-out way, the problem of upper class want of education and moral
+earnestness.
+
+It seemed to him also, as he shook hands with Miss Flodden, in her cart
+at Yetholme station, and took his place beside her in the vehicle, that
+not only all his own feelings about Miss Flodden, but Miss Flodden
+herself had changed. She had grown so much more like everybody else, he
+thought, or he had got to see her so much more in her reality. There was
+nothing exotic about her now, wrapped in a big, fuzzy cloak, a big cap
+drawn over her head, concealing the close, light-brown curls, and making
+her face so very much less keen in feature. He wondered why he had seen
+so much of the Celt in her, and such a far-fetched nervous fineness. She
+seemed also, in her almost monosyllabic conversation, mainly preoccupied
+with his portmanteau, the hours of his train, the names of the villages
+and hills they passed, and similar commonplace matters; whereas, in
+London he had noted the eager insistence with which she had immediately
+set the conversation and firmly kept it on intellectual and artistic
+problems.
+
+The cart rolled away by high-lying fields of pale green barley and oats
+shivering in the cold breeze, between the stunted hedges, whence an
+occasional wind-warped thorn-tree rose black against the pale yellow
+afternoon sky, with every now and then a bunch of blue cranesbill, or a
+little fluttering group of poppies, taking the importance of bushes and
+trees in this high, bleak, Northern country. Great savage dogs, with
+chests and pointed ears like the antique Cerberus, came barking out of
+the black stone cottages; and over the fields, from the tree-tops just
+visible in the river valley below, circled innumerable rooks, loudly
+cawing. The road made a sudden dip, and they were on a level with the
+wide, shingly bed of the Tweed, scattered sheep grazing along the banks.
+Then a black belfry appeared among black ash trees; a row of black
+cottages bordered the road with their hollyhocks and asters; and the
+cart rolled in between rows of rook-peopled trees, and stopped at last
+before a long, black stone house, sunk, as in some parts of Scotland,
+into a kind of trench. There was a frightful alarum of dogs of all
+kinds, rushing up from all directions. But Miss Flodden led Greenleaf
+into the house and through various passages, without any human being
+appearing, save a boy, to whom she threw the reins at the door. At last,
+in a big, dark drawing-room, a child was discovered helping herself to
+milk and bread and jam at a solitary table.
+
+"They're all out," she said, taking no notice of Greenleaf, although
+scanning him with the critical eyes of six or seven. "Cut me a scone,
+Val, and put butter on it, but not too much."
+
+"This is a step-sister of mine," explained Miss Flodden, laconically,
+nodding in the child's direction, as she threw aside her cloak, drew off
+her gloves, and began pouring out tea. "I say, leave that scone alone
+until I can cut it for you. It's rather hard lines on one for the family
+to have its tea and leave us only the cold dregs."
+
+She looked listless and calm and bored. Greenleaf wondered how he could
+ever have romanced about this handsome, commonplace young woman. Then he
+began to speculate as to where the famous collection was kept.
+
+
+V.
+
+"It's very unfair of me, of course," Miss Flodden remarked next morning,
+as she handed down plate after plate, jar after jar, to Greenleaf,
+seated, the catalogue before him and the pen in his hand, at a long deal
+table--"it's very unfair, and it isn't at all business, but I used to
+think I should like to see you again; and now, on account of these pots,
+I dislike you."
+
+Greenleaf looked up in astonishment. It was as if the veil of
+sullenness, preventing his recognition of Miss Flodden ever since his
+arrival, had suddenly been torn asunder by a burst of passion. The girl
+was standing by the glass case, dusting a Limoges platter with a feather
+brush, her mannish coat and short skirt covered with dust. She spoke in
+an undertone, and her eyes were looking down upon the platter; but it
+struck him at once that she was a Celt once more, and that the Celtic
+waywardness and emotion were bursting out the more irresistibly for
+that long repression due to the Spartan undemonstrativeness of smart
+society. He noticed also a trait he had forgotten, and which had seemed
+to be, long ago at the Museum, a sort of mark of temperament, telling
+of inherited ferocity in this well-bred young lady; two of her little
+white teeth, instead of being square pearls, like their companions, were
+pointed and sharp, like those of a wild animal. And as she raised her
+eyes, their light, whitish blue, flashed angrily.
+
+"Excuse my being so rude, Mr. Greenleaf," she added very coldly,
+"you have been so good, showing and explaining a lot of things to me,
+that it's only fair you should know that, on account of the pots, I
+have--well, got to dislike you. You see," she went on, turning her back
+to him, "they were my toys. They were the only people, except the trees
+and the river, one had to talk to sometimes."
+
+Greenleaf had noticed at dinner last night, and again this morning at
+lunch, that Miss Flodden seemed to have very little in common with her
+family, and, indeed, scarcely any communication at all.
+
+Sir Percy Flodden, an old gentleman with a beautiful white beard, and
+beautiful soft manners, but a deficiency in further characteristics, had
+found leisure, in the intervals of organising Primrose meetings, making
+speeches at Conservative dinners, writing letters to the _Times_ about
+breeds of cattle, and hunting and fishing a great deal, to get married
+a second time, and to produce a large number of younger fishermen and
+huntresses, future Primrose Leaguers and writers to the _Times_. The
+second wife being dead, and sundry aunts installed in her place, the
+younger generation of Floddens, after gradually emerging from the
+nursery, ran wild in brooks and streams, stables and haylofts, until
+the boys were packed off to civilisation and Eton, pending further
+civilisation and Sandhurst; and the girls were initiated into their
+proper form of civilisation by being taken to a drawing-room and then
+hustled into further female evolution by an energetic and tactful
+married sister. The elder girls were now at home, preparing clothes for
+various balls and packing trunks for various visits; and the elder boys
+had come back on holidays, with fishing-rods, coin collections, the
+first three books of Euclid, and the last new thing in slang; as to the
+younger half-brothers and sisters, they were still in the phase of the
+hayloft and stable, emerging only to partake of gigantic breakfasts and
+teas.
+
+Among all these good-natured and well-mannered, but somewhat dull
+creatures, Val Flodden moved in an atmosphere of her own, somewhat of a
+stranger, considerably of a puzzle, and regarded with the mixed awe and
+suspicion due to her having been recently an admittedly pretty woman,
+and now showing signs of becoming an undoubtedly eccentric one. Besides,
+there was the fact that Val Flodden was partially a Celt, and that her
+father and brothers were most emphatically Saxons.
+
+All this it has been necessary to explain that the reader might
+understand that Greenleaf might have understood Miss Flodden's
+passionate clinging to her sole companions at Yetholme, the old crockery
+of her grandfather's collection.
+
+But although Greenleaf did actually take in a portion of the situation,
+he was mainly impressed by the want of public spirit exhibited by the
+young lady; so inevitably do we expect other folk to possess even our
+most eccentric standards, and to rule their feelings and actions by
+notions of which they have probably never even heard.
+
+Miss Flodden had broken through all rules in manifesting her feelings
+about the pots; Greenleaf never dreamed of taking advantage of her false
+move, but with his usual simplicity, encouraged by a plain-spokenness,
+which never struck him as otherwise than natural, he answered very
+gravely: "Of course I understand how fond you must be of these beautiful
+things, and how much it must have been to you--it would be to anyone who
+cared for art, even if not specially interested like you in pottery--to
+have them constantly before you. But you ought to remember that you are
+parting with them for the advantage of others."
+
+Miss Flodden flushed a little. It was probably from surprise and shame
+at this man's stupidity. She must have felt as if she herself had
+alluded to the necessity of selling these heirlooms, as if she herself
+had done the incredible thing of pointing out the pecuniary advantage.
+Then, apparently, she reflected that if this man was so obtuse, he could
+not help himself; but that he was doubtless honest in his intentions.
+For she added coldly, and hiding her contemptuous face from him with a
+jar held at arms' length:
+
+"Of course I know that it's for the benefit of my brothers and sisters.
+I don't grudge them the money, heaven knows, and when one's broke,
+one's broke. Only it's sad to think what sort of things--what stupid
+amusements and useless necessaries these lovely things will be exchanged
+for, merely because the world is so idiotically constituted. You see,
+the possession of these pots ought to give everyone more pleasure than
+the possession of an additional horse, or an extra frock."
+
+Greenleaf was as much taken aback at her misconception of his meaning as
+she had been at her supposed understanding of it.
+
+"Good gracious, Miss Flodden, I didn't mean the advantage of your
+brothers and sisters. But surely you ought to reflect that these pots
+passing from a private house in Northumberland to the South Kensington
+Museum, will mean that hundreds of people will be afforded pleasure,
+instead of only one or two--one, namely yourself, by your own account.
+Besides, do you really think that any private individual has a moral
+right to keep for himself any object capable of giving a noble kind of
+pleasure to his fellows, merely because the present state of society
+allows him to possess more money than his neighbours, and to lock up
+things as his property? Surely art belongs to all who can enjoy it!"
+
+There was something fault-finding in Greenleaf's tone, owing to the fact
+that he could not realise such ideas, so very familiar to himself, not
+being equally familiar to everyone else.
+
+Miss Flodden set down the jar she was dusting, keeping her wrist
+balanced on its edge, and looked at Greenleaf with surprise in her blue
+eyes, which concentrated, and seemed to grow darker and deeper by the
+concentration.
+
+"Really," she asked incredulously, "are you speaking seriously? But
+then--what would become of luxury and so forth?"
+
+"The active would enjoy it as well as the idle--or rather, there would
+be no longer either active or idle; everyone would work and enjoy
+equally, and equally fairly and rationally."
+
+"Then," went on Miss Flodden slowly, the sequence of thoughts bursting
+with difficulty on to her mind, "no one would have things, except for
+real enjoyment and as a result of fairly earning them? People would all
+have books and beautiful trees and fields to look at, and pictures and
+music; but no diamonds, or stepping horses, or frocks from Worth--the
+things one has because other folk have them."
+
+Greenleaf smiled: she seemed to him, talking of these things which "one"
+had because "others" had them, things so futile, so foreign to his mind,
+extraordinarily like a child talking of the snakes, whales, and ogres,
+represented by tables and chairs, and hearthrugs.
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"At that rate," went on the girl, "there would no longer be any need for
+marrying and giving in marriage. One would live quite free; free to work
+at what one liked, and look about without folks worrying one."
+
+Greenleaf did not follow her thought, for his own thoughts were too
+foreign to the habits she was alluding to.
+
+"I don't see," he added simply, "why people shouldn't marry or be given
+in marriage because every one worked and had leisure. Some mightn't,
+perhaps, because some would always, perhaps, want to work too much, and
+because things matter to me--I mean to some--more than other people. But
+I can't see why others shouldn't marry and be given in marriage, Miss
+Flodden."
+
+A little contraction passed across the girl's face, and she answered in
+a hurried, husky voice:
+
+"No, no; that would be all over."
+
+And they fell again to the catalogue. It was a very hard day's work,
+that first one, for the catalogue was in horrid confusion; and they
+really could not have had time to talk much about other things, for they
+went on with merely a brief space for lunch, and Greenleaf was sent for
+a walk with one of the boys at tea time, while Miss Flodden unwillingly
+entertained some neighbours. Then at dinner the conversation, in which
+she took no part, rolled mainly upon local pedigrees, crops, how many
+fish the boys had caught, in what houses friends were staying, whom
+sundry young ladies of the neighbourhood were likely to marry, and how
+many bags had been made at the various shoots. Still, despite these
+irrelevant interests, Miss Flodden seemed to have understood why
+Greenleaf had expected her to like the sale of the collection, and
+Greenleaf to have understood why Miss Flodden should have been vexed
+at the collection being sold. At least there was a sense of mutual
+comprehension and good-will, such as the morning had scarcely promised.
+And when, after fretting a little over more bags of game and more
+local pedigrees, with his host and the boys after dinner, Greenleaf
+returned to find the ladies in various stages of somnolence, over the
+drawing-room fire; he experienced an odd sense of the naturalness of
+things when Miss Flodden asked whether he could play the piano, and took
+her violin out of its case.
+
+Miss Flodden did not play exactly well, for it appears that very few
+people do; and she, of course, had had but little opportunity of
+learning. Yet, in a way, she played the fiddle much better, Greenleaf
+felt, than he himself, who was decidedly a proficient, could play the
+piano. For there was in her playing the expression not merely of talent,
+but of extraordinary, passionate, dogged determination to master the
+instrument. It was as much this as the actual execution which gave the
+charm to her performance. To Greenleaf the charm was immense. He nearly
+always played, when he did play, with men; and he hated the way in which
+the fiddle crushes the starched hideous shirt, the movement of bowing
+rucks the black sleeve and hard white cuff too high above the red,
+masculine wrist; and among the dreams of his life there had always been
+a very silly one, of a younger sister--he always thought of her as
+called Emily--who would have learned the violin, and who would have
+stood before him like this, bow in hand, while he looked up from his
+piano. It seems odd, perhaps, that the fair violinist should never have
+appeared to his mind as a possible wife; but so it was. And so it was
+that this image, which had dawned upon his school-boy fancy long before
+the delectableness of marriage could ever be understood, and when his
+solitary little soul still smarted at his dull, grown-up, companionless
+home--so it was that the image of "Emily"--the imaginary sister with the
+violin--had gradually taken the place in his heart of that grave Miss
+Delia Carpenter, the only woman whom he had ever loved, and who had told
+him she was in love with another.
+
+The family was beginning to disperse; the girls to wake up yawning from
+their novels or their embroidery; the father to start suddenly from his
+slumber over the _Times_; the boys, having satisfied themselves in the
+newspapers about the number of brace of grouse, had sneaked off to
+prepare flies for the next day's fishing; and still the duet went on,
+the image of "Emily" gradually acquiring the blue eyes (its own had
+been brownish) and clear-cut, nervous features (she had hitherto had
+an irregular style of beauty) of Val Flodden.
+
+"That's enough," said Miss Flodden, putting her violin tenderly--she had
+the same rather unwonted tenderness with some of the majolica--into its
+case, and looking round at the sleepy faces of the family. "Jack, give
+Mr. Greenleaf his candle. And," she added, as they shook hands, "you'll
+tell me some more about how it will be when everybody works and has
+leisure, won't you, to-morrow?"
+
+That night Greenleaf saw in his dreams his father's rectory among the
+south country pines, the garden and paddock, the big library and loft
+full of books; and among it all there wandered about, rather dim in
+features, but unhesitatingly recognised, that imaginary sister, the
+violinist Emily.
+
+
+VI.
+
+"Tell me more about the Miss Carpenters," said Miss Flodden shyly,
+keeping her eyes fixed on the rapidly flowing twist of water between the
+big shingle, where every now and then came the spurt of a salmon's leap.
+
+They were seated, after tea, and another hard day's cataloguing, under
+some beech trees that overhung the Tweed. From the fields opposite--no
+longer England, already Scotland--came the pant and whirr of a
+threshing-machine; while from the woods issued the caw of innumerable
+rooks, blackening the sky. A heron rose from among the reeds of the
+bank, and mounted, printing the pale sky with his Japanese outline.
+There was incredible peacefulness, not unmixed with austerity, in the
+gurgle of the water, the green of the banks, the scent of damp earth.
+
+Greenleaf, who was very reserved about his friends, so much that one
+friend might almost have imagined him to possess no others, had somehow
+slid into speaking of his little Bloomsbury world to this girl, who was
+so foreign to it. It had come home to him how utterly Miss Flodden had
+lived out of contact with all the various concerns of life, and out of
+sight of the people who have such. Except pottery and violin music, come
+into her existence by the merest accident, and remaining there utterly
+isolated, she had no experience, save of the vanities of the world.
+But what struck him most, and seemed to him even more piteous, was her
+habit of regarding these vanities as matters not of amusement, but of
+important business. To her, personally, it would seem, indeed, that
+frocks, horses, diamonds, invitations to this house or that, and all the
+complications of social standing, afforded little or no satisfaction.
+But then she accepted the fact of being an eccentric, a creature not
+quite all it should be; and she expected everyone else to be different,
+to be seriously engaged in the pursuit of the things she, personally,
+and owing to her eccentricity, did not want.
+
+It was extraordinary how, while she expressed her own distaste for
+various weaknesses and shortcomings, she defended those who gave way to
+them as perfectly normal creatures. Greenleaf was horrified to hear her
+explain, with marvellous perception of how and wherefore, and without
+any blame, the manner in which women may gradually allow men not their
+husbands to pay their dressmaker's bills, and gradually to become
+masters of their purse and of themselves: the necessity of a new frock
+at some race or ball, the desire to outshine another woman, to get
+into royalty's notice, and the fear of incensing a husband already
+hard up--all this seemed to Miss Flodden perfectly natural and
+incontrovertible; and she pleaded for those who gave way under such
+pressure.
+
+"Of course I wouldn't do it," she said, twisting a long straw in
+her hands; "it strikes me as bad form, don't you know; but then I'm
+peculiar, and there are so many things in the world which other folk
+don't mind, and which I can't bear. I don't like some of their talk, and
+I don't like their not running quite straight. But then I seem to have
+been born with a skin less than one ought to have."
+
+Greenleaf listened in silent horror. In the course of discussing how
+much the world might be improved by some of his socialistic plans,
+this young lady of four or five and twenty had very simply and quietly
+unveiled a state of corruption, of which, in his tirades against wealth
+and luxury, he had had but the vaguest idea. "You see," Miss Flodden
+had remarked, "it's because one has to have so many things which one's
+neighbours have, whether they give one much pleasure or not, that a
+woman gets into such false positions, which make people, if things get
+too obvious, treat her in a beastly, unjust way. But women have always
+been told that they _must_ have this and that, and go to such and such a
+house, otherwise they'd not keep up in it all; and then they're fallen
+upon afterwards. It's awfully unfair. Why, of course, if one hadn't
+always been told that one _must_ have frocks, and carriages, and _must_
+go to Marlborough House, one wouldn't get married. Of course it's
+different with me, because I'm queer, and I like making pots, and am
+willing to know no one. But then that's all wrong, at least my married
+sister is always saying so. And, of course, I'm not going to marry,
+however much they bore me about it."
+
+"You speak as if women got married merely for the sake of living like
+their neighbours," remarked Greenleaf; "that's absurd."
+
+Miss Flodden, seated on a stone, looked up at him under his beech tree.
+Her face bore a curious expression of incredulity dashed with contempt.
+Could he be a Pharisee?
+
+"There may be exceptions," she answered, "and perhaps you may know some.
+But if a woman were secure of her living, and did not want things, why
+should she get married?" It was as if she had said, Why should a Hindoo
+widow burn herself? "There must be some inducement," she added, looking
+into the water and plucking at the grass, "to give oneself into the
+keeping of another person." Her face had that same contraction, as once
+when she had mentioned the matter before.
+
+"Good God," thought Greenleaf, "into what ugly bits of life had this
+girl been forced to look!" And he felt a great pity and indignation
+about things in general.
+
+Miss Flodden sent a stone skimming across the river, as if to dismiss
+the subject, and then it was that she said rather hesitatingly:
+
+"Tell me more about the Miss Carpenters."
+
+She had an odd, timid curiosity about Greenleaf's friends, about
+everyone who did anything, as if she feared to intrude on them even in
+thought.
+
+Greenleaf had spoken about them before and not unintentionally. These
+three sisters, living in their flat off Holborn, doing all their
+housework themselves, and yet finding time to work among the poor, to
+be cultivated and charming, were a stalking horse of his, an example he
+liked to bring before this member of fast society.
+
+He had taken his refusal by one of the sisters with a philosophy which
+had astonished himself, for he certainly had thought that Delia was very
+dear to him. She was dear in a way now. But he felt quite pleased at
+her marriage with young Farquhar of the Museum, and he rather enjoyed
+talking about her. He told Miss Flodden of Maggie Carpenter's work among
+the sweaters, and of the readings of English literature she and Clara
+gave to the shop-girls; and he was a little shocked, when he told her of
+the young woman from Shoolbred's who had borrowed a volume of Webster,
+that Val Flodden had never heard of that eminent dramatist, and thought
+he was the dictionary. He described the little suppers they gave in
+their big kitchen, where the one or two guests helped to lay the table
+and to wash up afterwards, previous to going to the highest seats in the
+Albert Hall, or to some socialist lecture; then the return on foot
+through the silent, black Bloomsbury streets. He made it sound even more
+idyllic than it really was. Then he spoke of Delia and the piano lessons
+she gave and the poems she wrote. He even repeated two of the poems out
+loud and felt that they were very beautiful.
+
+"They can never bore themselves," remarked Miss Flodden, pensively.
+
+"Bore themselves?" responded Greenleaf.
+
+"Yes: bore themselves and feel they just _must_ have something different
+to think about, like birds beating against cage bars." Then, after a
+pause, she said vaguely and hesitatingly: "I wish there were a chance
+for one to know the Miss Carpenters."
+
+Greenleaf brightened up. This was what he wished. "Of course you shall
+know them, if you care, Miss Flodden, only----"
+
+"Only--you mean that they would think me a bore and an intruder."
+
+"No," answered Greenleaf, he scarcely knew why, "that's not what I
+meant. But you must remember that you and they belong to different
+classes of society."
+
+Miss Flodden's face contracted. "Ah," she exclaimed angrily. "Why must
+you throw that in my face? You have said that sort of thing several
+times before. Why do you?"
+
+Why, indeed? For Greenleaf could not desist, every now and then, from
+bringing up that fact. It made the girl quiver, but he could not help
+himself; it was an attempt to find out whether she was really in
+earnest, which he occasionally doubted; and also it was a natural
+reaction against certain cynical assumptions, certain takings for
+granted on Miss Flodden's part that the vanity and corruption of her
+miserable little clique permeated the whole of the world--of the world
+which did not even know, in many instances, that there was such a thing
+as a smart lot!
+
+But now he was sorry.
+
+"Indeed," he said sorrowfully, "such a gulf between classes unfortunately
+still exists. In our civilisation, where luxury and the money which buys
+it go for so much, those who work must necessarily be separate from
+those who play."
+
+"Heaven knows you have no right to abuse us for having money," exclaimed
+Miss Flodden, much hurt. "Why, if I don't get married, and I shan't, I
+shall never have a penny to bless myself with."
+
+"It's a question of the lot one belongs to," answered Greenleaf
+unkindly; but added, rather remorsefully: "Would you like me to give you
+a letter for the Miss Carpenters when next you go to town? I have," he
+hesitated a little, "talked a good deal about you with them."
+
+"Really!" exclaimed Miss Flodden quickly. "That's awfully good of you--I
+mean to give me a letter--only I fear it will bore them. I shall be
+going to town for a week or two in October. May I call on them then, do
+you think?"
+
+"Of course." And Greenleaf, who was a business-like man, drew out his
+pocket-book, full of little patterns for pots and notes for lectures,
+and wrote on a clean page:
+
+"Mem.: Letter for the Miss Carpenters for Miss Flodden."
+
+"I will write it to-night or to-morrow; you shall have it before I
+leave. By the way, that train the day after to-morrow is at 6.20, is
+it not?"
+
+"Yes," answered Miss Flodden. "I wish you could stay longer."
+
+And they walked home.
+
+As they wandered through the high-lying fields of green oats and yellow
+barley, among whose long beards the low sun made golden dust, with the
+dark, greenish Cheviots on one side, purple clouds hanging on their moor
+sides, and the three cones of the Eildons rising, hills of fairy-land,
+faint upon the golden sunset mist--as they wandered talking of various
+things, pottery, philosophy, and socialism, Greenleaf felt stealing
+across his soul a peacefulness as unlike his usual mood, as this
+northern afternoon, with soughing grain and twittering of larks, was
+different from the grime and bustle of London. He knew, now, that Miss
+Delia Carpenter's refusal had been best for him; his nature was too
+thin to allow of his giving himself both to a wife and family, and to
+the duties and studies which claimed him; he would have starved the
+affections of the first while neglecting the second. His life must
+always be a solitary one with his work. But into this rather cheerless
+solitude, there seemed to be coming something, he could scarcely tell
+what. Greenleaf believed in the possible friendship between a man and
+a woman; if it had not existed often hitherto, that was the fault of
+our corrupt bringing up. But it was possible and necessary; a thing
+different from, more perfect and more useful, than any friendship
+between persons of the same sex. But more different still, breezier,
+more robust and serene, than love even at its best. And had he not
+always wished for that sister, that Emily who had never existed?
+Of course he did not contemplate seeing very much of Miss Flodden;
+still less did he admit to himself that this strange, reserved, yet
+outspoken girl might be the friend he craved for. But he felt a curious
+satisfaction, despite his better reason, which protested against
+everything abnormal, and which explained a great deal by premature
+experience of the world's ugliness--he felt a satisfaction at Miss
+Flodden's aversion to marriage. He could not have explained why, but he
+knew in a positive manner that this girl never had been, and never would
+be, in love; that this young woman of a frivolous and fast lot, was a
+sort of female Hippolytus, but without a male Diana; and he held tight
+to the knowledge as to a treasure.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The next day, Greenleaf was a little out of conceit with himself and
+the world at large: a vague depression and irritation got hold of
+him. Before breakfast, while ruminating over a list of books for Miss
+Flodden's reading, he had mechanically taken up a volume which lay on
+the drawing-room table. There were not many books at Yetholme, except
+those which were never moved from the library shelves; and the family's
+taste ran to Rider Haggard and sporting novels; while the collection
+put in his room, and bearing the name of _Valentine Flodden_, consisted
+either of things he already knew by heart--a selection from Browning, a
+volume of Tolstoy, and an Imitation of Christ;--or of others--as sundry
+works on Esoteric Buddhism, a handbook of Perspective, and a novel by
+Marie Corelli--which he felt little desire to read. The book that he
+took up was from the Circulating Library, Henry James's "Princess
+Casamassima." He had read it, of course, and dived into it--the last
+volume it was--at random. Do authors ever reflect how much influence
+they must occasionally have, coming by accident, to arouse some latent
+feeling, or to reinforce some dominant habit of mind? Certainly Henry
+James had been possessed of no ill-will towards Miss Val Flodden, whom
+indeed he might have made the heroine of some amiable story. Yet Henry
+James, at that moment, did Val Flodden a very bad turn. Greenleaf got
+up from the book, after twenty minutes' random reading, in a curiously
+suspicious and aggressive mood. Of course he never dreamed that he, a
+gentleman of some independent means, a scholar, a man who had known
+the upper classes long before he had ever come in contact with the
+lower, could have anything in common with poor Hyacinth, the socialist
+bookbinder, pining for luxury and the love of a great lady; neither
+was there much resemblance between Christina Light, married to Prince
+Casamassima, and this young Val Flodden married to nobody; yet the book
+depressed him horribly, by its suggestion of the odd freaks of curiosity
+which relieve the weariness of idle lives. And the depression was such,
+that he could not hold his tongue on the subject.
+
+"Have you read that book--the 'Princess Casamassima'--Miss Flodden?" he
+asked at breakfast.
+
+"Yes," answered the girl; "isn't it good? and so natural, don't you
+think?"
+
+"You don't mean that you think the Princess natural--you don't think
+there ever could be such a horrible woman?"
+
+He was quite sure there might be, indeed the fear of such an one quite
+overpowered him at this very moment; and he asked in hopes of Miss
+Flodden saying that there were no Princess Casamassimas.
+
+Something in his tone appeared to irritate Miss Flodden. She thought him
+pharisaical, as she sometimes did, and considered it her duty to give
+him a setting down with the weight of her superior worldly wisdom.
+
+"Of course I think her natural; only she might be more natural still."
+
+"You mean more wicked?" asked Greenleaf sharply.
+
+"No, not more wicked. The woman in the book may be intended to be
+wicked; but she needn't have been so in real life. Not at all wicked.
+She's merely a clever woman who is bored by society, and who wants to
+know about a lot of things and people. Heaps of women want to know about
+things because they're bored, but it's not always about nice things
+and nice people, as in the case of the Princess. She may have done
+mischief--she shouldn't have played with that wretched little morbid
+bookbinding boy; women oughtn't to play with men even when they're
+fools, indeed especially not then. But that wasn't inevitable. Hyacinth
+_would_ run under her wheels. Of course I shouldn't have cared for that
+chemist creature either, nor for that Captain Sholto; he behaved rather
+like a cad all round, don't you think? But after all, they all talked
+very well; about interesting things--real, important things--didn't
+they?"
+
+"And you think that to hear people talk about _real, important things_
+is a great delight, Miss Flodden?" asked Greenleaf, with a bitterness
+she did not fully appreciate.
+
+"You would understand it if you had lived for years among people who
+talked nothing but gossip and rot," she answered sadly, rising from her
+place.
+
+No more was said that morning about the Princess Casamassima. Miss
+Flodden was rather silent during their cataloguing work, and Greenleaf
+felt vaguely sore, he knew not what about.
+
+Throughout the day, there kept returning to his mind those words, "You
+see they talked very well, about interesting things, important, _real_
+things, didn't they?" and the simple, taking-things-for-granted tone
+in which they had been said. Women of her lot, Miss Flodden had once
+informed him, would go great lengths for the sake of a new frock or a
+pair of stepping horses. Was it not possible that some of them, to
+whom frocks and horses had been offered in too great abundance, might
+transfer their desire for novelty to interesting talk and _real_ things?
+
+That was their last afternoon together. The catalogue had been finished
+with. Miss Flodden took Greenleaf for a drive in her cart. They sped
+along under the rolling clouds of the blustering northern afternoon,
+the rooks, in black swarms, cawing loudly, and the pee-wits screeching
+among the stunted hedges and black stones of the green, close-nibbled
+pastures; it was one of those August days which foretell winter.
+Greenleaf could never recollect very well what they had talked about,
+except that it had been about a great variety of things, which the
+blustering wind had seemed to sweep away like the brown beech leaves
+in the hollows. The fact was that Greenleaf was not attending. He kept
+revolving in his mind the same idea, with the impossibility of solving
+it. He was rather like a man in love, who cannot decide whether or not
+he is sufficiently so to make a declaration and feels the propitious
+moment escaping. Greenleaf was not in love; had he been, had there been
+any chance of his being so, Val Flodden would not have been there in the
+cart by his side; she had once told him, in one of her fits of abstract
+communicativeness, that people in love were despicable, but for that
+reason to be pitied, and that to let them fall in love was to be
+unkind to them, and to prepare a detestable exhibition for oneself. So
+Greenleaf was not in love. But he was as excited as if he had been.
+He felt that a great suspicion had arisen within him; and that this
+suspicion was about to deprive him of a friendship to which he clung as
+to a newly-found interest in life.
+
+About Miss Flodden he did not think--that is to say, whether he might be
+running the risk of depriving _her_ of something. He had not made love
+to her, so what could he deprive her of? Besides he thought of Miss
+Flodden exclusively as of the person who was probably going to deprive
+him of something he wanted. Deprive him if his suspicions should be
+true. For if his suspicions were true, there was no alternative to
+giving up all relations with her. He was not a selfish man, trying to
+save himself heartburns and disenchantments. He was thinking of his
+opinions, solely. It was quite impossible that they should become the
+toys of an idle, frivolous woman. Such a thing could not be. The sense
+of sacrilege was so great that he did not even say to himself that such
+a thing could _not be allowed_: to him it took the form of impossibility
+of its being at all.
+
+Greenleaf was in an agony of doubt; he kept on repeating to himself--"Is
+she a Princess Casamassima?" so often, that at last he found it quite
+natural to put the question, so often formulated internally, out loud to
+her. Of course if she were a Princess Casamassima, her denial would be
+worth nothing; but when we cannot endure a suspicion against someone, we
+do not, in our wild desire to have it denied at any price, stop short to
+reflect that the denial will be worthless. A denial; he wanted a denial,
+not for the sake of justice towards her, but for his own peace of mind.
+He was on the very point of putting that strange question to her, when,
+in the process of a conversation in which he had taken part as in a
+dream, there suddenly came the unasked-for answer.
+
+They must have been talking of the Princess Casamassima again, and
+of the uninterestingness of most people's lives. Greenleaf could not
+remember. It was all muddled in his memory, only there suddenly flashed
+a sentence, distinct, burning, out of that forgotten confusion.
+
+"It's odd," said Miss Flodden's high, occasionally childish voice; "but
+I've always found that the people who bored one least were either very
+clever or very fast."
+
+They were clattering into a little border town, with low black houses
+on either side, and a square tower, with a red tile extinguisher, and a
+veering weather-cock, closing the distance and connecting the grey, wet
+flags below with the grey, billowy sky above.
+
+Greenleaf, although forgetful of all save theories, remembered for a
+long time that street and that tower. He did not answer, for his heart
+was overflowing with bitterness.
+
+So it was true; and it just had to be. He had let his belief become the
+plaything of a capricious child. He had lost his dear friend. It was
+inevitable.
+
+Greenleaf did not say a word, and showed nothing until his departure.
+But his letter to Miss Flodden, thanking for the hospitality of
+Yetholme, was brief, and it contained no allusion to any future meeting,
+and no promised introduction to the Miss Carpenters. Only at the end was
+this sentence: "I have lately been re-reading Henry James's 'Princess
+Casamassima': and I agree with you completely now as to the naturalness
+of her character."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Some ten years later found Leonard Greenleaf once more--but this time
+with only a brougham and a footman to meet him--on his way to stay in
+a country house. He had been left penniless by his attempts to start
+co-operative workshops: and overwork and worry had made him far too weak
+to be a tolerable artisan; so, after having given up his pottery, those
+long years ago, because it ministered exclusively to rich men's luxury,
+he had been obliged to swallow the bitterness of perfecting rich men's
+dwellings in the capacity of Messrs. Boyce & Co.'s chief decorator; and
+now he was bent upon one of these hated errands.
+
+Time, and the experience of many failures, had indeed perplexed poor
+Greenleaf's socialistic schemes a little, and had left him doubtful
+how to hasten the millennium, except by the slow methods of preaching
+morality and thrift; but time had rather exasperated his hatred of the
+idleness and selfishness of the privileged classes, to whose luxury
+he now found himself a minister. And, as he looked out of his window
+while dressing for dinner (those evening clothes, necessary for such
+occasions, had become a badge of servitude in his eyes), he felt that
+old indignation arise with unaccountable strength, and choke him with
+his own silence. It was a long, low house, the lawn spread, with
+scarcely any fall, down to the river brink; a wide band of green, then a
+wide band of shimmering, undecided blue and grey, reflecting the coppery
+clouds and purple banks of loose-strife, and then beyond and higher up
+in the picture, flat meadows, whose surface was beginning to be veiled
+in mist, and whose boundary elms were growing flat and unsubstantial,
+like painted things. There were birds twittering, and leaves rustling:
+a great sense of peacefulness, for the family and guests were doubtless
+within doors busy dressing. Suddenly, there was a plash of oars, and a
+peal of laughter; and, after a minute, two men and a woman came hurrying
+up the green lawn, against whose darkening slopes their white clothes
+made spots of unearthly whiteness in the twilight. They were noisy, and
+Greenleaf hated their laughter; but suddenly the lady stopped short a
+moment, and said to her companions in a tone of boredom and irritation:
+"Oh, shut up; can't you let one look about and listen to things once in
+a way?"
+
+There was more laughter, and they all disappeared indoors. Greenleaf
+leaned upon his window, wondering where he had heard that voice
+before--that voice, or rather one different, but yet very like it.
+
+Downstairs, after a few civil speeches about the pleasure of having the
+assistance of so great an artistic authority, and sundry contradictory
+suggestions about styles of furniture and architecture, Greenleaf's host
+and hostess requested him to join in a little game devised for the
+removal of precedence in the arrangement of places at table. The game,
+which had been suggested that very moment by one of the various tall,
+blond and moustached youths hanging about the drawing-room, consisted
+in hiding all the men behind a door curtain, whence projected, as sole
+clue to their identity, their more or less tell-tale feet, by which the
+ladies were to choose their partners. The feet, so Greenleaf said to
+himself, were singularly without identity; he saw in his mind's eye
+the row of projecting, pointed-toed, shining pumps, cut low upon the
+fantastic assortment of striped, speckled, and otherwise enlivened silk
+stockings. Among them all there could only be a single pair betraying
+the nature of their owner, and it was his. They said, or would say, in
+the mute but expressive language of their square-toedness (Greenleaf
+felt as if they might have elastic sides even, although his democratic
+views had always stopped short before that), that their owner was the
+curate, the tutor, the house-decorator, in fine, the interloper. He
+wondered whether, as good nature to himself and consideration for the
+other guests must prompt, those feet would be immediately selected
+by the mistress of the house, or whether they would be left there
+unclaimed, when all the others had marched cheerfully off.
+
+But his suspense was quickly converted into another feeling, when among
+the laughter and exclamations provoked by the performance, a voice came
+from beyond the curtain, saying slowly: "I think I'll have this pair."
+The voice was the same he had heard from the lawn, the same he had heard
+years ago in the British Museum, and on the banks of the Tweed--the same
+which once or twice since, but at ever-increasing intervals, he had
+tried in vain to recall to his mind's hearing. The voice--but grown
+deeper, more deliberate and uniformly weary--of Val Flodden.
+
+Greenleaf heard vaguely the introductory interchange of names performed
+by his hostess; and felt in his back the well-bred smile of amusement
+of the couples still behind, as the lady took his unprepared arm and
+walked him off in the helter-skelter move to the dining-room; and it
+was as in a dream that he heard his name pronounced, with the added
+information, on the part of his companion, that it was a long time since
+they had last met.
+
+"Yes," answered Greenleaf, as the servant gently pushed him and his
+chair nearer the table; "it must be quite a lot of years ago. I have
+come here," he added, he scarce knew why--but with a vague sense of
+protest and self-defence--"about doing up the house."
+
+"Yes, to be sure--it is all going to be overhauled and made beautiful
+and inappropriate," replied the lady, with a faint intonation of
+insolence, Greenleaf thought, in her bored voice.
+
+"It is not always easy, is it," rejoined Greenleaf, "to make things
+appropriate?"
+
+"And beautiful? I suppose not. We aren't any of us very appropriate to a
+river-bank, with cows lowing and scythes being whetted and all that sort
+of thing, when one comes to think of it."
+
+"Oh, I do think cows are such interesting creatures--don't you?" put in
+the charming voice of a charming, charmingly dressed, innocent looking
+woman opposite, who was evidently the accredited fool of the party.
+"Sir Robert took us to see a lot of his--all over the dairies, you
+know--this afternoon, while you were punting."
+
+Another lady, also very charming and charmingly dressed, but neither
+innocent nor foolish, made some comment on this speech to the man next
+to her; he said something in his turn, there was a general suppressed
+laugh, and the innocent looking lady laughed too; but protesting they
+oughtn't to say such things.
+
+Greenleaf's mind, little accustomed to the charms of innuendoes
+and slippery allusions, had not followed the intricacies of the
+conversation. An astonishing girl, beautiful with the beauty of a
+well-bred horse, sat next to him, and tried to perplex him with sundry
+questions which she knew he could not follow; but she speedily found
+there was no rise to be got out of him, and bestowed elsewhere her
+remarks, racy in more senses than one. So Greenleaf sat silent, looking
+vaguely at the pools of light beneath the candle-shades, in which the
+rose petals strewn about, the roses lying loosely, took warm old ivory
+tints, and the silver--the fantastic confusion of chased salt-cellars
+and menu-holders and spoons and indescribable objects--flashed blue
+and lilac on its smooth or chiselled surfaces. From the table the
+concentrated, shaded light led upwards to the opal necklace of the lady
+opposite, the blue of the opals changing, with the movement of her head,
+to green, burning and flickering into fiery sparks; then Greenleaf
+noticed, sometimes modelled into roundness and sometimes blurred into
+flatness in the shadow, the black sleeves of the men, the arms of the
+women, ivory like the rose petals where they advanced beneath the
+candle-shades; and behind, to the back of the shimmer of the light
+stuffs and the glare of white shirt-fronts, the big footmen, vague,
+shadowy, moving about. A man opposite, with babyish eyes and complexion,
+was telling some story about walking from a punt into the water, which
+raised the wrath of the girl near Greenleaf; others added further
+details, which she laughingly tried to deny; there was something about
+having fastened her garter with a diamond star, and the river having to
+be dragged for it. Another man, gaunt and languid, said something about
+not hiding old damask under rose-leaves; but being unnoticed by his
+hostess, went on about "Parsifal" to his neighbour, the lady interested
+in cows. There were also allusions to the other Cowes, the place, and
+to yachting; and a great many to various kinds of sport and to gambling
+and losing money; indeed, it was marvellous how much money was lost and
+bankruptcy sustained (technically called _getting broke_).
+
+The men were mostly more good-looking than not; the women, it seemed
+to Greenleaf, beautiful enough, each of them, to reward a good month's
+search. There was a smell, cool and white and acute, of gardenias, from
+the buttonholes, and a warmer, vaguer one of rose petals; the mixture of
+black coats and indescribable coloured silk, and of bare arms and necks,
+the alternations of concentrated light and vague shadow, the occasional
+glint and glimmer of stones, particularly that warm ivory of roses among
+the silver, struck Greenleaf, long unaccustomed to even much slighter
+luxury, as extraordinarily beautiful, like some Tadema picture of Roman
+orgies. And the more beautiful it seemed to him, with its intentional,
+elaborate beauty, the more did it make him gnash his teeth with the
+sense of its wickedness, and force him, for his own conscience' sake, to
+conjure up other pictures: of grimy, gaslit London streets, and battered
+crowds round barrows of cheap, half-spoilt food.
+
+The lady who had once been called Val Flodden, and whose name--and he
+fancied he had heard it before--was now Mrs. Hermann Struwe, addressed
+him with the necessary politeness, and asked him one or two questions
+about his work and so forth, in a conventional, bored tone. But,
+although the knowledge that this was his old acquaintance, and the
+recognition, every now and then, of the fact, put his feelings into a
+superficial flutter, Greenleaf's mind kept revolving the fact that this
+woman was really quite a stranger to him; and the apparently somewhat
+contradictory fact that this was what, after all, he had known she would
+end in. He noted that among these beautiful and self-satisfied women,
+with their occasional cleverness and frequent unseemliness of word and
+allusion, the former Val Flodden was in a way conspicuous, not because
+she was better looking, but because she was more weary, more reckless,
+because one somehow expected her to do more, for good or bad, than the
+others.
+
+"I don't see exactly which of the party could have reported the case,"
+said the woman with the opals, "at least, the crucifix could scarcely
+have done so ... well, well."
+
+There was a great deal of laughter, as the hostess gave the signal
+for rising; but over it and the rustle and crackle of the ladies'
+frocks, the voice of Mrs. Hermann Struwe was heard to say in languid,
+contemptuous tone: "I think your story is a little bit beastly, my dear
+Algy."
+
+Fortunately for Greenleaf, the men did not stay long at table, as
+smoking was equally allowed all over the house and in the ladies'
+presence. For Greenleaf, whose conversation with other men had for years
+turned only on politics, philosophy, or business, was imbued, much as a
+woman might have been, with a foregone conviction that as soon as idle
+men were left to themselves they began to discuss womankind. And there
+was at the table one man in particular, a long, black, nervous man, with
+a smiling, jerky mouth, an odd sample of Jewry acclimatised in England,
+a horrid, half-handsome man, with extraordinarily bland manners and
+an extraordinarily hard expression, obstinate and mocking, about whom
+Greenleaf felt that he positively could not sit out any of _his_
+conversation on women, and, of course, _his_ conversation _would_ turn
+on women; partly, perhaps, because the fellow had been introduced as Mr.
+Hermann Struwe.
+
+Her husband--_that_ was her husband! Greenleaf kept repeating to
+himself, as he answered as best he could his host's remarks about
+Elizabethan as against Queen Anne. It was only now when he thought of
+her in connection with this man that Greenleaf realised that he was
+really a little upset by this meeting with his old acquaintance. And
+the thought went on and on, round and round, in his head, when he had
+followed the first stragglers who went to smoke their cigarettes with
+the ladies, and answered the interrogations of the aesthetic man who had
+talked about old damask and Wagner. The man in question, delighted to
+lay hold of so great an authority as Greenleaf, had also noticed that
+Greenleaf had known Mrs. Hermann Struwe at some former period. He had
+evidently been snubbed a little by the lady, and partly from a desire to
+hear her artistic capacities pooh-poohed by a professional (since every
+amateur imagines himself the only tolerable one), and partly from a
+natural taste for knowing what did not concern him, he had set very
+artfully to pump poor Greenleaf, who, at best, was no match for a wily
+man of the world.
+
+"Miss Flodden had a good deal of talent--quite a remarkable talent--as a
+draughtsman, had she only studied seriously," he answered emphatically,
+seeing only that the fellow wished for some quotable piece of running
+down. "It is, in fact, a pity"--but he stopped. He was really not
+thinking of that. The long drawing-room opened with all its windows on
+to the lawn, and you could see, at the bottom of that, the outlines of
+trees and boats in the moonlight, and Chinese lanterns hanging about the
+flotilla of moored punts and canoes and skiffs, to which some of the
+party had gone down, revealing themselves with occasional splashings,
+thrummings on the banjo, and little cries and peals of laughter. Nearer
+the house a couple was walking up and down on the grass, the light of
+the drawing-room lamps catching their faces with an odd, yellow glow
+every now and then, and making the woman's white frock shimmer like
+silver against the branches of the big cedars. "It appears Lady Lilly
+told her mother she was going to try on a frock, but somehow on the way
+there she met Morton's coach, so she thought she'd get on to it and have
+some change of air and she changed the air so often that by the evening
+she had contrived to win sixty pounds at Sandown," said one of the
+promenading couples, pausing in the stream of light from the window.
+"Oh, bless your soul, she doesn't mind it's being told; she thinks it
+an awful joke, and so it was."
+
+That man--that Val Flodden should have married that man--Greenleaf kept
+repeating to himself, and the recollection of her words about never
+getting married, about a world where there would be no diamonds and no
+stepping horses, and also, as she expressed it, no marrying and giving
+in marriage, filled Greenleaf's mind as with some bitter, heady dram.
+And he had thought of her as a sort of unapproachable proud amazon, or
+Diana of Hippolytus, incapable of any feeling save indignation against
+injustice and pity for weak and gentle things. Oh Lord, oh Lord! It was
+horrible, horrible, and at the same time laughable. And just that man,
+too--that narrow, obstinate looking creature with the brain and the
+heart (Greenleaf knew it for a certainty) of a barn-door cock! And yet,
+was he any worse than the others, the others who, perhaps, had a little
+more brains and a little more heart, and who all the same lived only to
+waste the work of the poor, to make debts, to gamble, to ruin women, and
+to fill the world with filthy talk and disbelief in better things? Was
+he worse than all the other manly, well-mannered, accomplished, futile,
+or mischievous creatures? Was he worse than _she_?
+
+"Ah, well, of course; you have known her so much more than I have,"
+said the aesthetic man, puffing at his cigarette, opposite to Greenleaf.
+"But now, I should have thought there would have always been something
+lacking in anything that woman would do. A certain--I don't know what
+to call it--but, in short, proper mental balance and steadiness. I
+consider, that for real artistic quality, it is necessary that one
+should possess some sort of seriousness, of consistency of character--of
+course you know her so much better, Mr. Greenleaf--but now I can't
+understand a really artistic woman--after refusing half a dozen other
+fellows who were at least gentlemen, suddenly choosing a tubbed Jew like
+that--and apparently not seeing that he is only a tubbed Jew," the
+aesthetic man stopped, disappointed in not getting a rise from Greenleaf,
+but Greenleaf was scarcely listening.
+
+A man had sat down to the piano and was singing, on the whole, rather
+well. Some of the people were standing by him, others were in little
+groups, men and women nearly all smoking equally, scattered about the
+big white room with the delicate blue china, and the big stacks of pale
+pink begonias. Mrs. Hermann Struwe was standing near the piano, leaning
+against the long, open window, the principal figure in a group of two
+other women and a man. In her fanciful, straight-hanging dress of
+misty-coloured crape, her hair, elaborately and tightly dressed, making
+her small head even smaller, and her strong, slender neck, with the
+black pearls around it, drawn up like a peacock's, she struck Greenleaf
+as much more beautiful than before, and even much taller; but there
+had been a gentleness, a something timid and winning, in her former
+occasional little stoop, which was now quite gone. She looked young, but
+young in quite another way; she was now very thin, and her cheeks were
+hollowed very perceptibly.
+
+The bland, blurred man at the piano was singing with all his might,
+and with considerable voice and skill; but the music, of his own
+composition, was indecorously passionate as he sang it, at least taken
+in connection with the words, culled from some decadent French poet, and
+which few people would have deliberately read out aloud. The innocent
+lady who had talked about cows even made some faint objection, to
+which the singer answered much surprised, by blandly pointing out the
+passionate charm of the words, and assuring her that she did not know
+what real feeling was. And when he had finished that song, and begun
+another, one of the two other women actually moved away, while the
+other buried her head in a volume of _Punch_; there was a little murmur,
+"Well, I think he is going a little too far." But Mrs. Hermann Struwe
+never moved.
+
+"I can't make out that woman," remarked Greenleaf's new acquaintance,
+the aesthetic man; "she's usually by ways of being prudish, and has a
+way of shutting up poor Chatty when he gets into this strain. Only
+yesterday, she told him his song was beastly, and it wasn't half as
+bad as this one. I expect she's doing it from cussedness, because her
+husband was bored at her being too particular yesterday; because, of
+course, he'll be bored by her not being particular enough to-day."
+
+Greenleaf walked up to a picture, and thence slunk off to the door. As
+he was leaving the room, he looked back at the former Miss Flodden: she
+was still standing near the piano, listening composedly, but he thought
+that her thin face bore an expression of defiance.
+
+He was so excited that he opened his room door too quickly to give
+effect to a practical joke, consisting of a can of water balancing on
+its angle as it stood ajar, and intended to tumble on his head while
+he was passing in; a delicate jest which the girl who had sat next to
+him--she of the punt, diamond garter and coach adventures--occasionally
+practised on the new inmates of what she technically called "houses."
+
+
+IX.
+
+The next morning, after surveying the house with his host, and making
+elaborate plans for its alteration with his hostess, Greenleaf was going
+for a stroll outside the grounds, when he suddenly heard his name called
+by the voice of her who had once been Val Flodden, but of whom he already
+thought only as Mrs. Hermann Struwe. She arose from under a big cedar,
+among whose sweeping branches she had been seated reading.
+
+"Are you going for a walk?" she asked, coming towards him in her white
+frock, incredibly white against the green lawn, and trailing her also
+incredibly white parasol after her.
+
+"Is it true that you go back to town this afternoon?"
+
+"Yes," answered Greenleaf, laconically.
+
+"Then," she said, "I will come with you a little way."
+
+They walked silently through a little wood of beeches, and out into the
+meadows by the river. Greenleaf found it too difficult to say anything,
+and, after all, why say anything to her?
+
+"Look here," began Mrs. Hermann Struwe, suddenly stopping short by the
+water's brink. "I want to speak to you quite plainly, Mr. Greenleaf.
+Quite plainly, as one does, don't you know, to a person one isn't likely
+ever to meet again. I didn't want to speak to you yesterday,
+because--well--because I disliked you too much."
+
+Greenleaf looked up from the grasses steeping at the root of a big
+willow, in the water.
+
+"Why?" he asked blankly, but a vague pain invading his consciousness,
+with the recollection of the library at Yetholme, of the catalogue and
+the dusty majolica, when Miss Flodden had said once before that she
+disliked him, because he was taking away the pots.
+
+"But I've thought over it," she went on, not noticing his interruption;
+"and I see again, what I recognised years ago--only that every now and
+then I can't help forgetting it and feeling bad--namely, that it was
+quite natural on your part--I mean your never having introduced me to
+the Miss Carpenters, nor even written to me again." She spoke slowly
+and very gently, with just a little hesitation, as he remembered so well
+her having done those years ago in Northumberland.
+
+An unknown feeling overwhelmed Greenleaf and prevented his speaking--the
+feeling, he vaguely understood, of having destroyed, of having killed
+something.
+
+"I don't reproach you with it. I never really did. I understood very
+soon that it was quite natural on your part to take me for a Princess
+Casamassima. I had done nothing to make you really know me, and I had no
+right to expect you to take me on my own telling. And there must have
+been so many things to make you suspect my not deserving to know your
+friends, or to learn about your ideas. It wasn't that," she added,
+hurriedly, "that I wished really to explain, because, as I repeat,
+although I sometimes feel unreasonable and angry, like last night, when
+something suddenly makes me see the contrast between what I might have
+been, and what I am, I don't bear you any grudge. What I wanted to tell
+you, Mr. Greenleaf, is that I wasn't unworthy of the confidence, though
+it wasn't much, which you once placed in me. I was not a Princess
+Casamassima; I was not a humbug then, saying things and getting you to
+say them for the sake of the novelty. And I'm not really changed since.
+I wasn't a worthless woman then; and I haven't really become a worthless
+woman now. Shall we go towards home? I think I heard the gong."
+
+They were skirting the full river, with its fringe of steeping
+loose-strife and meadow-sweet, and its clumps of sedge, starred with
+forget-me-not, whence whirred occasional water-fowl. From the field
+opposite there came every now and then the lazy low of a cow.
+
+"It was very different, wasn't it, on the Tweed," she said, looking
+round her; "the banks so steep and bare, and all that shingle. Do you
+remember the heron? Didn't he look Japanese? I hate all this," and she
+dug up a pellet of green with her parasol point, and flung it far into
+the water.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "to you it must seem the very proof of your
+suspicions having been justified, I mean your finding me again--well, in
+this house. And, perhaps, you may remember my telling you, all those
+years ago at Yetholme, that I would never marry."
+
+She raised her eyes from the ground and looked straight into his, with
+that odd deepening of colour of her own. She had guessed his thoughts:
+that sentence about not marrying and being given in marriage was ringing
+in his mind; and he felt, as she looked into his face, that she wished
+above all to clear herself from that unspoken accusation.
+
+"I never should have, most likely," she went on. "Although you must
+remember that all my bringing up had consisted in teaching me that a
+woman's one business in life _is_ to marry, to make a good marriage, to
+marry into this set, a man like my husband. For a long while before I
+ever met you, I had made up my mind that although this was undoubtedly
+the natural and virtuous course, I would not follow it, that I would
+rather earn my living or starve; and I had been taught that to do
+either, to go one's own ways and think one's own thoughts, was
+scandalous. It was about this that I had broken with my sister. She had
+bothered me to marry one of a variety of men whom she unearthed for the
+purpose; and we quarrelled because I refused the one she wanted me to
+have most--the one, as a matter of fact, who is now my husband. I tell
+you all these uninteresting things because I want you to know that I was
+in earnest when I told you I did not want the things a woman gets by
+marrying. I was in earnest," she went on, stopping and twisting a long
+willow leaf round her finger, the tone of her voice changing suddenly
+from almost defiant earnestness to a sad, helpless little tone, "but it
+was of no good. I saw--you showed me--that I was locked, walled into the
+place into which I had been born; you made me feel that it was useless
+for an outsider to try to gain the confidence of you people who work and
+care about things; that your friends would consider me an intruder,
+that you considered me a humbug--you slammed in my face the little door
+through which I had hoped to have escaped from all this sort of thing."
+
+And she nodded towards the white house, stretched like a little
+encampment upon the green river bank, with the flotilla of boats and
+punts and steam launches, moored before its windows.
+
+"Then," said Greenleaf, a light coming into his mind, a light such
+as would reveal some great ruin of flood or fire to the unconscious
+criminal who has opened the sluice or dropped the match in the dark,
+"then you sat out that song last night to make me understand...?"
+
+"It was very childish of me, and also very unjust," answered Mrs.
+Hermann composedly. "Of course you couldn't help it. I don't feel angry
+with you. But sometimes, when I remember those weeks when I gradually
+understood that it was all to be, and I made up my mind to live out the
+life for which I had been born--and, now that the pots were sold--well,
+to sell myself also to the highest bidder--sometimes I did feel a little
+bad. You see when one is really honest oneself, it is hard to be
+misunderstood--and the more misunderstood the more one explains
+oneself--by other people who are honest."
+
+They walked along in silence; which Greenleaf broke by asking as in a
+dream--"And your violin?"
+
+"Oh! I've given that up long ago--my husband didn't like it, and as he
+has given me everything that I possess, it wouldn't be business, would
+it, to do things he dislikes? If it had been the piano, or the guitar,
+or the banjo! But a woman can't lock herself up and practice the fiddle!
+People would think it odd. And now," she added, as they came in sight
+of the little groups of variegated pink and mauve frocks, and the
+white boating-clothes under the big cedars, "good-bye, Mr. Greenleaf;
+and--be a little more trustful to other people who may want your
+friendship--won't you? I shall like to think of that." She stretched out
+her hand, with the thin glove loosely wrinkled over the arm, and she
+smiled that good, wide-eyed smile, like that of a good, serious child
+who wishes to understand.
+
+Greenleaf did not take her hand at once.
+
+"You have children at least?" he asked hoarsely.
+
+She understood his thought, but hesitated before answering.
+
+"I have three--somewhere--at the sea-side, or some other place where
+children ought to be when their parents go staying about,"--she answered
+quickly--"they are quite happy, with plenty of toys, now; and they will
+be quite happy when they grow up, for they will have plenty of money,
+and they will be their father's image--good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye," answered Greenleaf, and added, after he had let go her hand,
+"It is very generous of you to be so forgiving. But your generosity
+makes it only more impossible for me ever to forgive myself."
+
+Out of the station of that little group of river houses the line goes
+almost immediately on to a long bridge. It was in process of repair,
+and as the train moved slowly across, Greenleaf could see, on the upper
+river reach, close beneath him, a flotilla of boats, canoes, and skiffs
+of various sizes, surrounding a punt, and all of them gay with lilac
+and pale green and pale pink frocks, and white flannels, and coloured
+sashes and cushions, and fantastic umbrellas. Some of the ladies were
+scrambling from one of the skiffs into the punt, which was pinned into
+its place by the long pole held upright in the green, glassy water,
+reflecting the pink, green, lilac, and white, the red cushions, and the
+shimmering greyness of the big willows. There was much laughter and
+some little shrieks, and the twang of a banjo; and it looked altogether
+like some modern Watteau's version of a latter-day embarkation for the
+island of Venus. And, in the little heap of bright colours, Greenleaf
+recognised, over the side of a skiff, the parasol, white, incredibly
+white, of the former Val Flodden.
+
+
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF MADAME KRASINSKA.
+
+
+It is a necessary part of this story to explain how I have come by it,
+or rather, how it has chanced to have me for its writer.
+
+I was very much impressed one day by a certain nun of the order calling
+themselves Little Sisters of the Poor. I had been taken to these
+sisters to support the recommendation of a certain old lady, the former
+door-keeper of his studio, whom my friend Cecco Bandini wished to place
+in the asylum. It turned out, of course, that Cecchino was perfectly
+able to plead his case without my assistance; so I left him blandishing
+the Mother Superior in the big, cheerful kitchen, and begged to be shown
+over the rest of the establishment. The sister who was told off to
+accompany me was the one of whom I would speak.
+
+This lady was tall and slight; her figure, as she preceded me up the
+narrow stairs and through the whitewashed wards, was uncommonly elegant
+and charming; and she had a girlish rapidity of movement, which caused
+me to experience a little shock at the first real sight which I caught
+of her face. It was young and remarkably pretty, with a kind of
+refinement peculiar to American women; but it was inexpressibly,
+solemnly tragic; and one felt that under her tight linen cap, the hair
+must be snow white. The tragedy, whatever it might have been, was now
+over; and the lady's expression, as she spoke to the old creatures
+scraping the ground in the garden, ironing the sheets in the laundry, or
+merely huddling over their braziers in the chill winter sunshine, was
+pathetic only by virtue of its strange present tenderness, and by that
+trace of terrible past suffering.
+
+She answered my questions very briefly, and was as taciturn as ladies of
+religious communities are usually loquacious. Only, when I expressed my
+admiration for the institution which contrived to feed scores of old
+paupers on broken victuals begged from private houses and inns, she
+turned her eyes full upon me and said, with an earnestness which was
+almost passionate, "Ah, the old! The old! It is so much, much worse for
+them than for any others. Have you ever tried to imagine what it is to
+be poor and forsaken and old?"
+
+These words and the strange ring in the sister's voice, the strange
+light in her eyes, remained in my memory. What was not, therefore, my
+surprise when, on returning to the kitchen, I saw her start and lay hold
+of the back of the chair as soon as she caught sight of Cecco Bandini.
+Cecco, on his side also, was visibly startled, but only after a moment;
+it was clear that she recognised him long before he identified her. What
+little romance could there exist in common between my eccentric painter
+and that serene but tragic Sister of the Poor?
+
+A week later, it became evident that Cecco Bandini had come to explain
+the mystery; but to explain it (as I judged by the embarrassment of
+his manner) by one of those astonishingly elaborate lies occasionally
+attempted by perfectly frank persons. It was not the case. Cecchino had
+come indeed to explain that little dumb scene which had passed between
+him and the Little Sister of the Poor. He had come, however, not to
+satisfy my curiosity, or to overcome my suspicions, but to execute a
+commission which he had greatly at heart; to help, as he expressed it,
+in the accomplishment of a good work by a real saint.
+
+Of course, he explained, smiling that good smile under his black
+eyebrows and white moustache, he did not expect me to believe very
+literally the story which he had undertaken to get me to write. He only
+asked, and the lady only wished, me, to write down her narrative without
+any comments, and leave to the heart of the reader the decision about
+its truth or falsehood.
+
+For this reason, and the better to attain the object of appealing to
+the profane, rather than to the religious, reader, I have abandoned the
+order of narrative of the Little Sister of the Poor; and attempted to
+turn her pious legend into a worldly story, as follows:--
+
+
+I.
+
+Cecco Bandini had just returned from the Maremma, to whose solitary
+marshes and jungles he had fled in one of his fits of fury at the
+stupidity and wickedness of the civilised world. A great many months
+spent among buffaloes and wild boars, conversing only with those wild
+cherry-trees, of whom he used whimsically to say, "they are such
+good little folk," had sent him back with an extraordinary zest for
+civilisation, and a comic tendency to find its products, human and
+otherwise, extraordinary, picturesque, and suggestive. He was in this
+frame of mind when there came a light rap on his door-slate; and two
+ladies appeared on the threshold of his studio, with the shaven face and
+cockaded hat of a tall footman over-topping them from behind. One of
+them was unknown to our painter; the other was numbered among Cecchino's
+very few grand acquaintances.
+
+"Why haven't you been round to me yet, you savage?" she asked, advancing
+quickly with a brusque hand-shake and a brusque bright gleam of eyes
+and teeth, well-bred but audacious and a trifle ferocious. And dropping
+on to a divan she added, nodding first at her companion and then at the
+pictures all round, "I have brought my friend, Madame Krasinska, to see
+your things," and she began poking with her parasol at the contents of a
+gaping portfolio.
+
+The Baroness Fosca--for such was her name--was one of the cleverest and
+fastest ladies of the place, with a taste for art and ferociously frank
+conversation. To Cecco Bandini, as she lay back among her furs on that
+shabby divan of his, she appeared in the light of the modern Lucretia
+Borgia, the tamed panther of fashionable life. "What an interesting
+thing civilisation is!" he thought, watching her every movement with the
+eyes of the imagination; "why, you might spend years among the wild folk
+of the Maremma without meeting such a tremendous, terrible, picturesque,
+powerful creature as this!"
+
+Cecchino was so absorbed in the Baroness Fosca, who was in reality not
+at all a Lucretia Borgia, but merely an impatient lady bent upon amusing
+and being amused, that he was scarcely conscious of the presence of
+her companion. He knew that she was very young, very pretty, and very
+smart, and that he had made her his best bow, and offered her his least
+rickety chair; for the rest, he sat opposite to his Lucretia Borgia of
+modern life, who had meanwhile found a cigarette, and was puffing away
+and explaining that she was about to give a fancy ball, which should be
+the most _crane_, the only amusing thing, of the year.
+
+"Oh," he exclaimed, kindling at the thought, "do let me design you a
+dress all black and white and wicked green--you shall go as Deadly
+Nightshade, as Belladonna Atropa----"
+
+"Belladonna Atropa! why my ball is in comic costume" ... The Baroness
+was answering contemptuously, when Cecchino's attention was suddenly
+called to the other end of the studio by an exclamation on the part of
+his other visitor.
+
+"Do tell me all about her;--has she a name? Is she really a lunatic?"
+asked the young lady who had been introduced as Madame Krasinska,
+keeping a portfolio open with one hand, and holding up in the other a
+coloured sketch she had taken from it.
+
+"What have you got there? Oh, only the Sora Lena!" and Madame Fosca
+reverted to the contemplation of the smoke-rings she was making.
+
+"Tell me about her--Sora Lena, did you say?" asked the younger lady
+eagerly.
+
+She spoke French, but with a pretty little American accent, despite her
+Polish name. She was very charming, Cecchino said to himself, a radiant
+impersonation of youthful brightness and elegance as she stood there
+in her long, silvery furs, holding the drawing with tiny, tight-gloved
+hands, and shedding around her a vague, exquisite fragrance--no, not
+a mere literal perfume, that would be far too coarse but something
+personal akin to it.
+
+"I have noticed her so often," she went on, with that silvery young
+voice of hers; "she's mad, isn't she? And what did you say her name was?
+Please tell me again."
+
+Cecchino was delighted. "How true it is," he reflected, "that only
+refinement, high-breeding, luxury can give people certain kinds of
+sensitiveness, of rapid intuition! No woman of another class would have
+picked out just that drawing, or would have been interested in it
+without stupid laughter."
+
+"Do you want to know the story of poor old Sora Lena?" asked Cecchino,
+taking the sketch from Madame Krasinska's hand, and looking over it at
+the charming, eager young face.
+
+The sketch might have passed for a caricature; but anyone who had spent
+so little as a week in Florence those six or seven years ago would have
+recognised at once that it was merely a faithful portrait. For Sora
+Lena--more correctly Signora Maddalena--had been for years and years one
+of the most conspicuous sights of the town. In all weathers you might
+have seen that hulking old woman, with her vague, staring, reddish
+face, trudging through the streets or standing before shops, in her
+extraordinary costume of thirty years ago, her enormous crinoline, on
+which the silk skirt and ragged petticoat hung limply, her gigantic
+coal-scuttle bonnet, shawl, prunella boots, and great muff or parasol;
+one of several outfits, all alike, of that distant period, all alike
+inexpressibly dirty and tattered. In all weathers you might have seen
+her stolidly going her way, indifferent to stares and jibes, of which,
+indeed, there were by this time comparatively few, so familiar had she
+grown to staring, jibing Florence. In all weathers, but most noticeably
+in the worst, as if the squalor of mud and rain had an affinity with
+that sad, draggled, soiled, battered piece of human squalor, that
+lamentable rag of half-witted misery.
+
+"Do you want to know about Sora Lena?" repeated Cecco Bandini,
+meditatively. They formed a strange, strange contrast, these two women,
+the one in the sketch and the one standing before him. And there was to
+him a pathetic whimsicalness in the interest which the one had excited
+in the other. "How long has she been wandering about here? Why, as long
+as I can remember the streets of Florence, and that," added Cecchino
+sorrowfully, "is a longer while than I care to count up. It seems to
+me as if she must always have been there, like the olive-trees and
+the paving stones; for after all, Giotto's tower was not there before
+Giotto, whereas poor old Sora Lena--But, by the way, there is a limit
+even to her. There is a legend about her; they say that she was once
+sane, and had two sons, who went as Volunteers in '59, and were killed
+at Solferino, and ever since then she has sallied forth, every day,
+winter or summer, in her best clothes, to meet the young fellows at the
+Station. May be. To my mind it doesn't matter much whether the story
+be true or false; it is fitting," and Cecco Bandini set about dusting
+some canvases which had attracted the Baroness Fosca's attention. When
+Cecchino was helping that lady into her furs, she gave one of her little
+brutal smiles, and nodded in the direction of her companion.
+
+"Madame Krasinska," she said laughing, "is very desirous of possessing
+one of your sketches, but she is too polite to ask you the price of it.
+That's what comes of our not knowing how to earn a penny for ourselves,
+doesn't it, Signor Cecchino?"
+
+Madame Krasinska blushed, and looked more young, and delicate, and
+charming.
+
+"I did not know whether you would consent to part with one of your
+drawings," she said in her silvery, child-like voice,--"it is--this
+one--which I should so much have liked to have--... to have ... bought."
+Cecchino smiled at the embarrassment which the word "bought" produced in
+his exquisite visitor. Poor, charming young creature, he thought; the
+only thing she thinks people one knows can sell, is themselves, and
+that's called getting married. "You must explain to your friend," said
+Cecchino to the Baroness Fosca, as he hunted in a drawer for a piece of
+clean paper, "that such rubbish as this is neither bought nor sold; it
+is not even possible for a poor devil of a painter to offer it as a gift
+to a lady--but,"--and he handed the little roll to Madame Krasinska,
+making his very best bow as he did so--"it is possible for a lady
+graciously to accept it."
+
+"Thank you so much," answered Madame Krasinska, slipping the drawing
+into her muff; "it is very good of you to give me such a ... such a
+very interesting sketch," and she pressed his big, brown fingers in her
+little grey-gloved hand.
+
+"Poor Sora Lena!" exclaimed Cecchino, when there remained of the visit
+only a faint perfume of exquisiteness; and he thought of the hideous old
+draggle-tailed mad woman, reposing, rolled up in effigy, in the
+delicious daintiness of that delicate grey muff.
+
+
+II.
+
+A fortnight later, the great event was Madame Fosca's fancy ball, to
+which the guests were bidden to come in what was described as comic
+costume. Some, however, craved leave to appear in their ordinary
+apparel, and among these was Cecchino Bandini, who was persuaded,
+moreover, that his old-fashioned swallow-tails, which he donned only
+at weddings, constituted quite comic costume enough.
+
+This knowledge did not interfere at all with his enjoyment. There was
+even, to his whimsical mind, a certain charm in being in a crowd among
+which he knew no one; unnoticed or confused, perhaps, with the waiters,
+as he hung about the stairs and strolled through the big palace rooms.
+It was as good as wearing an invisible cloak, one saw so much just
+because one was not seen; indeed, one was momentarily endowed (it seemed
+at least to his fanciful apprehension) with a faculty akin to that of
+understanding the talk of birds; and, as he watched and listened he
+became aware of innumerable charming little romances, which were
+concealed from more notable but less privileged persons.
+
+Little by little the big white and gold rooms began to fill. The ladies,
+who had moved in gorgeous isolation, their skirts displayed as finely as
+a peacock's train, became gradually visible only from the waist upwards;
+and only the branches of the palm-trees and tree ferns detached
+themselves against the shining walls. Instead of wandering among
+variegated brocades and iridescent silks and astonishing arrangements of
+feathers and flowers, Cecchino's eye was forced to a higher level by the
+thickening crowd; it was now the constellated sparkle of diamonds on
+neck and head which dazzled him, and the strange, unaccustomed splendour
+of white arms and shoulders. And, as the room filled, the invisible
+cloak was also drawn closer round our friend Cecchino, and the
+extraordinary faculty of perceiving romantic and delicious secrets in
+other folk's bosoms became more and more developed. They seemed to him
+like exquisite children, these creatures rustling about in fantastic
+dresses, powdered shepherds and shepherdesses with diamonds spirting
+fire among their ribbons and top-knots; Japanese and Chinese embroidered
+with sprays of flowers; mediaeval and antique beings, and beings hidden
+in the plumage of birds, or the petals of flowers; children, but
+children somehow matured, transfigured by the touch of luxury and
+good-breeding, children full of courtesy and kindness. There were, of
+course, a few costumes which might have been better conceived or better
+carried out, or better--not to say best--omitted altogether. One grew
+bored, after a little while, with people dressed as marionettes,
+champagne bottles, sticks of sealing-wax, or captive balloons; a young
+man arrayed as a female ballet dancer, and another got up as a wet
+nurse, with baby _obligato_ might certainly have been dispensed with.
+Also, Cecchino could not help wincing a little at the daughter of the
+house being mummed and painted to represent her own grandmother, a
+respectable old lady whose picture hung in the dining-room, and whose
+spectacles he had frequently picked up in his boyhood. But these were
+mere trifling details. And, as a whole, it was beautiful, fantastic.
+So Cecchino moved backward and forward, invisible in his shabby black
+suit, and borne hither and thither by the well-bred pressure of the
+many-coloured crowd; pleasantly blinded by the innumerable lights,
+the sparkle of chandelier pendants, and the shooting flames of jewels;
+gently deafened by the confused murmur of innumerable voices, of
+crackling stuffs and soughing fans, of distant dance music; and inhaling
+the vague fragrance which seemed less the decoction of cunning perfumers
+than the exquisite and expressive emanation of this exquisite bloom of
+personality. Certainly, he said to himself, there is no pleasure so
+delicious as seeing people amusing themselves with refinement: there is
+a transfiguring magic, almost a moralising power, in wealth and elegance
+and good-breeding.
+
+He was making this reflection, and watching between two dances, a tiny
+fluff of down sailing through the warm draught across the empty space,
+the sort of whirlpool of the ball-room--when a little burst of voices
+came from the entrance saloon. The multi-coloured costumes fluttered
+like butterflies toward a given spot, there was a little heaping
+together of brilliant colours and flashing jewels. There was much
+craning of delicate, fluffy young necks and heads, and shuffle on
+tiptoe, and the crowd fell automatically aside. A little gangway was
+cleared; and there walked into the middle of the white and gold
+drawing-room, a lumbering, hideous figure, with reddish, vacant face,
+sunk in an immense, tarnished satin bonnet; and draggled, faded, lilac
+silk skirts spread over a vast dislocated crinoline. The feet dabbed
+along in the broken prunella boots; the mangy rabbit-skin muff bobbed
+loosely with the shambling gait; and then, under the big chandelier,
+there came a sudden pause, and the thing looked slowly round, a gaping,
+mooning, blear-eyed stare.
+
+It was the Sora Lena.
+
+There was a perfect storm of applause.
+
+
+III.
+
+Cecchino Bandini did not slacken his pace till he found himself, with
+his thin overcoat and opera hat all drenched, among the gas reflections
+and puddles before his studio door; that shout of applause and that
+burst of clapping pursuing him down the stairs of the palace and
+all through the rainy streets. There were a few embers in his stove;
+he threw a faggot on them, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to make
+reflections, the wet opera hat still on his head. He had been a fool, a
+savage. He had behaved like a child, rushing past his hostess with that
+ridiculous speech in answer to her inquiries: "I am running away because
+bad luck has entered your house."
+
+Why had he not guessed it at once? What on earth else could she have
+wanted his sketch for?
+
+He determined to forget the matter, and, as he imagined, he forgot it.
+Only, when the next day's evening paper displayed two columns describing
+Madame Fosca's ball, and more particularly "that mask," as the reporter
+had it, "which among so many which were graceful and ingenious, bore off
+in triumph the palm for witty novelty," he threw the paper down and gave
+it a kick towards the wood-box. But he felt ashamed of himself, picked
+it up, smoothed it out and read it all--foreign news and home news, and
+even the description of Madame Fosca's masked ball, conscientiously
+through. Last of all he perused, with dogged resolution, the column of
+petty casualties: a boy bit in the calf by a dog who was not mad; the
+frustrated burgling of a baker's shop; even to the bunches of keys and
+the umbrella and two cigar-cases picked up by the police, and consigned
+to the appropriate municipal limbo; until he came to the following
+lines: "This morning the _Guardians of Public Safety_, having been
+called by the neighbouring inhabitants, penetrated into a room on the
+top floor of a house situate in the Little Street of the Gravedigger
+(Viccolo del Beccamorto), and discovered, hanging from a rafter, the
+dead body of Maddalena X. Y. Z. The deceased had long been noted
+throughout Florence for her eccentric habits and apparel." The paragraph
+was headed, in somewhat larger type: "Suicide of a female lunatic."
+
+Cecchino's cigarette had gone out, but he continued blowing at it all
+the same. He could see in his mind's eye a tall, slender figure, draped
+in silvery plush and silvery furs, standing by the side of an open
+portfolio, and holding a drawing in her tiny hand, with the slender,
+solitary gold bangle over the grey glove.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Madame Krasinska was in a very bad humour. The old Chanoiness, her
+late husband's aunt, noticed it; her guests noticed it; her maid noticed
+it: and she noticed it herself. For, of all human beings, Madame
+Krasinska--Netta, as smart folk familiarly called her--was the least
+subject to bad humour. She was as uniformly cheerful as birds are
+supposed to be, and she certainly had none of the causes for anxiety or
+sorrow which even the most proverbial bird must occasionally have. She
+had always had money, health, good looks; and people had always told
+her--in New York, in London, in Paris, Rome, and St. Petersburg--from
+her very earliest childhood, that her one business in life was to amuse
+herself. The old gentleman whom she had simply and cheerfully accepted
+as a husband, because he had given her quantities of bonbons, and was
+going to give her quantities of diamonds, had been kind, and had been
+kindest of all in dying of sudden bronchitis when away for a month,
+leaving his young widow with an affectionately indifferent recollection
+of him, no remorse of any kind, and a great deal of money, not to speak
+of the excellent Chanoiness, who constituted an invaluable chaperon.
+And, since his happy demise, no cloud had disturbed the cheerful life
+or feelings of Madame Krasinska. Other women, she knew, had innumerable
+subjects of wretchedness; or if they had none, they were wretched from
+the want of them. Some had children who made them unhappy, others were
+unhappy for lack of children, and similarly as to lovers; but she had
+never had a child and never had a lover, and never experienced the
+smallest desire for either. Other women suffered from sleeplessness, or
+from sleepiness, and took morphia or abstained from morphia with equal
+inconvenience; other women also grew weary of amusement. But Madame
+Krasinska always slept beautifully, and always stayed awake cheerfully;
+and Madame Krasinska was never tired of amusing herself. Perhaps it was
+all this which culminated in the fact that Madame Krasinska had never in
+all her life envied or disliked anybody; and that no one, apparently,
+had ever envied or disliked her. She did not wish to outshine or
+supplant any one; she did not want to be richer, younger, more
+beautiful, or more adored than they. She only wanted to amuse herself,
+and she succeeded in so doing.
+
+This particular day--the day after Madame Fosca's ball--Madame Krasinska
+was not amusing herself. She was not at all tired: she never was;
+besides, she had remained in bed till mid-day: neither was she unwell,
+for that also she never was; nor had anyone done the slightest thing
+to vex her. But there it was. She was not amusing herself at all. She
+could not tell why; and she could not tell why, also, she was vaguely
+miserable. When the first batch of afternoon callers had taken leave,
+and the following batches had been sent away from the door, she threw
+down her volume of Gyp, and walked to the window. It was raining: a
+thin, continuous spring drizzle. Only a few cabs, with wet, shining
+backs, an occasional lumbering omnibus or cart, passed by with wheezing,
+straining, downcast horses. In one or two shops a light was appearing,
+looking tiny, blear, and absurd in the gray afternoon. Madame Krasinska
+looked out for a few minutes; then, suddenly turning round, she brushed
+past the big palms and azaleas, and rang the bell.
+
+"Order the brougham at once," she said.
+
+She could by no means have explained what earthly reason had impelled
+her to go out. When the footman had inquired for orders she felt at
+a loss: certainly she did not want to go to see anyone, nor to buy
+anything, nor to inquire about anything.
+
+What _did_ she want? Madame Krasinska was not in the habit of driving
+out in the rain for her pleasure; still less to drive out without
+knowing whither. What did she want? She sat muffled in her furs, looking
+out on the wet, grey streets as the brougham rolled aimlessly along. She
+wanted--she wanted--she couldn't tell what. But she wanted it very much.
+That much she knew very well--she wanted. The rain, the wet streets, the
+muddy crossings--oh, how dismal they were! and still she wished to go
+on.
+
+Instinctively, her polite coachman made for the politer streets, for the
+polite Lung' Arno. The river quay was deserted, and a warm, wet wind
+swept lazily along its muddy flags. Madame Krasinska let down the glass.
+How dreary! The foundry, on the other side, let fly a few red sparks
+from its tall chimney into the grey sky; the water droned over the weir;
+a lamp-lighter hurried along.
+
+Madame Krasinska pulled the check-string.
+
+"I want to walk," she said.
+
+The polite footman followed behind along the messy flags, muddy and full
+of pools; the brougham followed behind him. Madame Krasinska was not at
+all in the habit of walking on the embankment, still less walking in the
+rain.
+
+After some minutes she got in again, and bade the carriage drive home.
+When she got into the lit streets she again pulled the check-string and
+ordered the brougham to proceed at a foot's pace. At a certain spot she
+remembered something, and bade the coachman draw up before a shop. It
+was the big chemist's.
+
+"What does the Signora Contessa command?" and the footman raised his hat
+over his ear. Somehow she had forgotten. "Oh," she answered, "wait a
+minute. Now I remember, it's the next shop, the florist's. Tell them to
+send fresh azaleas to-morrow and fetch away the old ones."
+
+Now the azaleas had been changed only that morning. But the polite
+footman obeyed. And Madame Krasinska remained for a minute, nestled in
+her fur rug, looking on to the wet, yellow, lit pavement, and into the
+big chemist's window. There were the red, heart-shaped chest protectors,
+the frictioning gloves, the bath towels, all hanging in their place.
+Then boxes of eau-de-Cologne, lots of bottles of all sizes, and boxes,
+large and small, and variosities of indescribable nature and use, and
+the great glass jars, yellow, blue, green, and ruby red, with a spark
+from the gas lamp behind in their heart. She stared at it all, very
+intently, and without a notion about any of these objects. Only she knew
+that the glass jars were uncommonly bright, and that each had a ruby, or
+topaz, or emerald of gigantic size, in its heart. The footman returned.
+
+"Drive home," ordered Madame Krasinska. As her maid was taking her out
+of her dress, a thought--the first since so long--flashed across her
+mind, at the sight of certain skirts, and an uncouth cardboard mask,
+lying in a corner of her dressing-room. How odd that she had not seen
+the Sora Lena that evening.... She used always to be walking in the lit
+streets at that hour.
+
+
+V.
+
+The next morning Madame Krasinska woke up quite cheerful and happy. But
+she began, nevertheless, to suffer, ever since the day after the Fosca
+ball, from the return of that quite unprecedented and inexplicable
+depression. Her days became streaked, as it were, with moments during
+which it was quite impossible to amuse herself; and these moments grew
+gradually into hours. People bored her for no accountable reason, and
+things which she had expected as pleasures brought with them a sense of
+vague or more distinct wretchedness. Thus she would find herself in the
+midst of a ball or dinner-party, invaded suddenly by a confused sadness
+or boding of evil, she did not know which. And once, when a box of new
+clothes had arrived from Paris, she was overcome, while putting on one
+of the frocks, with such a fit of tears that she had to be put to bed
+instead of going to the Tornabuoni's party.
+
+Of course, people began to notice this change; indeed, Madame Krasinska
+had ingenuously complained of the strange alteration in herself. Some
+persons suggested that she might be suffering from slow blood-poisoning,
+and urged an inquiry into the state of the drains. Others recommended
+arsenic, morphia, or antipyrine. One kind friend brought her a box of
+peculiar cigarettes; another forwarded a parcel of still more peculiar
+novels; most people had some pet doctor to cry up to the skies; and one
+or two suggested her changing her confessor; not to mention an attempt
+being made to mesmerise her into cheerfulness.
+
+When her back was turned, meanwhile, all the kind friends discussed the
+probability of an unhappy love affair, loss of money on the Stock
+Exchange, and similar other explanations. And while one devoted lady
+tried to worm out of her the name of her unfaithful lover and of the
+rival for whom he had forsaken her, another assured her that she was
+suffering from a lack of personal affections. It was a fine opportunity
+for the display of pietism, materialism, idealism, realism, psychological
+lore, and esoteric theosophy.
+
+Oddly enough, all this zeal about herself did not worry Madame
+Krasinska, as she would certainly have expected it to worry any other
+woman. She took a little of each of the tonic or soporific drugs; and
+read a little of each of those sickly sentimental, brutal, or politely
+improper novels. She also let herself be accompanied to various doctors;
+and she got up early in the morning and stood for an hour on a chair
+in a crowd in order to benefit by the preaching of the famous Father
+Agostino. She was quite patient even with the friends who condoled about
+the lover or absence of such. For all these things became, more and
+more, completely indifferent to Madame Krasinska--unrealities which had
+no weight in the presence of the painful reality.
+
+This reality was that she was rapidly losing all power of amusing
+herself, and that when she did occasionally amuse herself she had to pay
+for what she called this _good time_ by an increase of listlessness and
+melancholy.
+
+It was not melancholy or listlessness such as other women complained of.
+They seemed, in their fits of blues, to feel that the world around them
+had got all wrong, or at least was going out of its way to annoy them.
+But Madame Krasinska saw the world quite plainly, proceeding in the
+usual manner, and being quite as good a world as before. It was she
+who was all wrong. It was, in the literal sense of the words, what
+she supposed people might mean when they said that So-and-so was _not
+himself_; only that So-and-so, on examination, appeared to be very much
+himself--only himself in a worse temper than usual. Whereas she... Why,
+in her case, she really did not seem to be herself any longer. Once, at
+a grand dinner, she suddenly ceased eating and talking to her neighbour,
+and surprised herself wondering who the people all were and what they
+had come for. Her mind would become, every now and then, a blank; a
+blank at least full of vague images, misty and muddled, which she was
+unable to grasp, but of which she knew that they were painful, weighing
+on her as a heavy load must weigh on the head or back. Something had
+happened, or was going to happen, she could not remember which, but she
+burst into tears none the less. In the midst of such a state of things,
+if visitors or a servant entered, she would ask sometimes who they were.
+Once a man came to call, during one of these fits; by an effort she was
+able to receive him and answer his small talk more or less at random,
+feeling the whole time as if someone else were speaking in her place.
+The visitor at length rose to depart, and they both stood for a moment
+in the midst of the drawing-room.
+
+"This is a very pretty house; it must belong to some rich person. Do you
+know to whom it belongs?" suddenly remarked Madame Krasinska, looking
+slowly round her at the furniture, the pictures, statuettes, nicknacks,
+the screens and plants. "Do you know to whom it belongs?" she repeated.
+
+"It belongs to the most charming lady in Florence," stammered out the
+visitor politely, and fled.
+
+"My darling Netta," exclaimed the Chanoiness from where she was seated
+crocheting benevolently futile garments by the fire; "you should not
+joke in that way. That poor young man was placed in a painful, in a very
+painful position by your nonsense."
+
+Madame Krasinska leaned her arms on a screen, and stared her respectable
+relation long in the face.
+
+"You seem a kind woman," she said at length. "You are old, but then you
+aren't poor, and they don't call you a mad woman. That makes all the
+difference."
+
+Then she set to singing--drumming out the tune on the screen--the
+soldier song of '59, _Addio, mia bella, addio_.
+
+"Netta!" cried the Chanoiness, dropping one ball of worsted after
+another. "Netta!"
+
+But Madame Krasinska passed her hand over her brow and heaved a great
+sigh. Then she took a cigarette off a cloisonne tray, dipped a spill in
+the fire and remarked,
+
+"Would you like to have the brougham to go to see your friend at
+the Sacre Coeur, Aunt Therese? I have promised to wait in for Molly
+Wolkonsky and Bice Forteguerra. We are going to dine at _Doney's_ with
+young Pomfret."
+
+
+VI.
+
+Madame Krasinska had repeated her evening drives in the rain. Indeed
+she began also to walk about regardless of weather. Her maid asked her
+whether she had been ordered exercise by the doctor, and she answered
+yes. But why she should not walk in the Cascine or along the Lung' Arno,
+and why she should always choose the muddiest thoroughfares, the maid
+did not inquire. As it was, Madame Krasinska never showed any repugnance
+or seemly contrition for the state of draggle in which she used to
+return home; sometimes when the woman was unbuttoning her boots, she
+would remain in contemplation of their muddiness, murmuring things which
+Jefferies could not understand. The servants, indeed, declared that the
+Countess must have gone out of her mind. The footman related that she
+used to stop the brougham, get out and look into the lit shops, and that
+he had to stand behind, in order to prevent lady-killing youths of a
+caddish description from whispering expressions of admiration in her
+ear. And once, he affirmed with horror, she had stopped in front of a
+certain cheap eating-house, and looked in at the bundles of asparagus,
+at the uncooked chops displayed in the window. And then, added the
+footman, she had turned round to him slowly and said,
+
+"They have good food in there."
+
+And meanwhile, Madame Krasinska went to dinners and parties, and gave
+them, and organised picnics, as much as was decently possible in Lent,
+and indeed a great deal more.
+
+She no longer complained of the blues; she assured everyone that she
+had completely got rid of them, that she had never been in such spirits
+in all her life. She said it so often, and in so excited a way, that
+judicious people declared that now that lover must really have jilted
+her, or gambling on the Stock Exchange have brought her to the verge of
+ruin.
+
+Nay, Madame Krasinska's spirits became so obstreperous as to change her
+in sundry ways. Although living in the fastest set, Madame Krasinska had
+never been a fast woman. There was something childlike in her nature
+which made her modest and decorous. She had never learned to talk slang,
+or to take up vulgar attitudes, or to tell impossible stories; and she
+had never lost a silly habit of blushing at expressions and anecdotes
+which she did not reprove other women for using and relating. Her
+amusements had never been flavoured with that spice of impropriety, of
+curiosity of evil, which was common in her set. She liked putting on
+pretty frocks, arranging pretty furniture, driving in well got up
+carriages, eating good dinners, laughing a great deal, and dancing a
+great deal, and that was all.
+
+But now Madame Krasinska suddenly altered. She became, all of a sudden,
+anxious for those exotic sensations which honest women may get by
+studying the ways, and frequenting the haunts, of women by no means
+honest. She made up parties to go to the low theatres and music-halls;
+she proposed dressing up and going, in company with sundry adventurous
+spirits, for evening strolls in the more dubious portions of the town.
+Moreover, she, who had never touched a card, began to gamble for large
+sums, and to surprise people by producing a folded green roulette cloth
+and miniature roulette rakes out of her pocket. And she became so
+outrageously conspicuous in her flirtations (she who had never flirted
+before), and so outrageously loud in her manners and remarks, that her
+good friends began to venture a little remonstrance....
+
+But remonstrance was all in vain; and she would toss her head and laugh
+cynically, and answer in a brazen, jarring voice.
+
+For Madame Krasinska felt that she must live, live noisily, live
+scandalously, live her own life of wealth and dissipation, because ...
+
+She used to wake up at night with the horror of that suspicion. And in
+the middle of the day, pull at her clothes, tear down her hair, and rush
+to the mirror and stare at herself, and look for every feature, and
+clutch for every end of silk, or bit of lace, or wisp of hair, which
+proved that she was really herself. For gradually, slowly, she had come
+to understand that she was herself no longer.
+
+Herself--well, yes, of course she was herself. Was it not herself who
+rushed about in such a riot of amusement; herself whose flushed cheeks
+and over-bright eyes, and cynically flaunted neck and bosom she saw
+in the glass, whose mocking loud voice and shrill laugh she listened
+to? Besides, did not her servants, her visitors, know her as Netta
+Krasinska; and did she not know how to wear her clothes, dance, make
+jokes, and encourage men, afterwards to discourage them? This, she often
+said to herself, as she lay awake the long nights, as she sat out the
+longer nights gambling and chaffing, distinctly proved that she really
+was herself. And she repeated it all mentally when she returned, muddy,
+worn out, and as awakened from a ghastly dream, after one of her long
+rambles through the streets, her daily walks towards the station.
+
+But still.... What of those strange forebodings of evil, those muddled
+fears of some dreadful calamity ... something which had happened, or was
+going to happen ... poverty, starvation, death--whose death, her own? or
+someone else's? That knowledge that it was all, all over; that blinding,
+felling blow which used every now and then to crush her.... Yes, she had
+felt that first at the railway station. At the station? but what had
+happened at the station? Or was it going to happen still? Since to the
+station her feet seemed unconsciously to carry her every day. What was
+it all? Ah! she knew. There was a woman, an old woman, walking to the
+station to meet.... Yes, to meet a regiment on its way back. They came
+back, those soldiers, among a mob yelling triumph. She remembered the
+illuminations, the red, green, and white lanterns, and those garlands
+all over the waiting-rooms. And quantities of flags. The bands played.
+So gaily! They played Garibaldi's hymn, and _Addio, Mia Bella_. Those
+pieces always made her cry now. The station was crammed, and all the
+boys, in tattered, soiled uniforms, rushed into the arms of parents,
+wives, friends. Then there was like a blinding light, a crash.... An
+officer led the old woman gently out of the place, mopping his eyes. And
+she, of all the crowd, was the only one to go home alone. Had it really
+all happened? and to whom? Had it really happened to her, had her
+boys.... But Madame Krasinska had never had any boys.
+
+It was dreadful how much it rained in Florence; and stuff boots do wear
+out so quick in mud. There was such a lot of mud on the way to the
+station; but of course it was necessary to go to the station in order to
+meet the train from Lombardy--the boys must be met.
+
+There was a place on the other side of the river where you went in and
+handed your watch and your brooch over the counter, and they gave you
+some money and a paper. Once the paper got lost. Then there was a
+mattress, too. But there was a kind man--a man who sold hardware--who
+went and fetched it back. It was dreadfully cold in winter, but the
+worst was the rain. And having no watch one was afraid of being late
+for that train, and had to dawdle so long in the muddy streets. Of
+course one could look in at the pretty shops. But the little boys were
+so rude. Oh, no, no, not that--anything rather than be shut up in an
+hospital. The poor old woman did no one any harm--why shut her up?
+
+"_Faites votre jeu, messieurs_," cried Madame Krasinska, raking up the
+counters with the little rake she had had made of tortoise-shell, with a
+gold dragon's head for a handle--"_Rien ne va plus--vingt-trois--Rouge,
+impair et manque_."
+
+
+VII.
+
+How did she come to know about this woman? She had never been inside
+that house over the tobacconist's, up three pairs of stairs to the left;
+and yet she knew exactly the pattern of the wall-paper. It was green,
+with a pinkish trellis-work, in the grand sitting-room, the one which
+was opened only on Sunday evenings, when the friends used to drop in and
+discuss the news, and have a game of _tresette_. You passed through the
+dining-room to get through it. The dining-room had no window, and was
+lit from a skylight; there was always a little smell of dinner in it,
+but that was appetising. The boys' rooms were to the back. There was
+a plaster Joan of Arc in the hall, close to the clothes-peg. She was
+painted to look like silver, and one of the boys had broken her arm,
+so that it looked like a gas-pipe. It was Momino who had done it,
+jumping on to the table when they were playing. Momino was always the
+scapegrace; he wore out so many pairs of trousers at the knees, but he
+was so warm-hearted! and after all, he had got all the prizes at school,
+and they all said he would be a first-rate engineer. Those dear boys!
+They never cost their mother a farthing, once they were sixteen; and
+Momino bought her a big, beautiful muff out of his own earnings as a
+pupil-teacher. Here it is! Such a comfort in the cold weather, you can't
+think, especially when gloves are too dear. Yes, it is rabbit-skin, but
+it is made to look like ermine, quite a handsome article. Assunta, the
+maid of all work, never would clean out that kitchen of hers--servants
+are such sluts! and she tore the moreen sofa-cover, too, against a nail
+in the wall. She ought to have seen that nail! But one mustn't be too
+hard on a poor creature, who is an orphan into the bargain. Oh, God! oh,
+God! and they lie in the big trench at San Martino, without even a cross
+over them, or a bit of wood with their name. But the white coats of the
+Austrians were soaked red, I warrant you! And the new dye they call
+magenta is made of pipe-clay--the pipe-clay the dogs clean their white
+coats with--and the blood of Austrians. It's a grand dye, I tell you!
+
+Lord, Lord, how wet the poor old woman's feet are! And no fire to warm
+them by. The best is to go to bed when one can't dry one's clothes; and
+it saves lamp-oil. That was very good oil the parish priest made her a
+present of ... Ai, ai, how one's bones ache on the mere boards, even
+with a blanket over them! That good, good mattress at the pawn-shop!
+It's nonsense about the Italians having been beaten. The Austrians were
+beaten into bits, made cats'-meat of; and the volunteers are returning
+to-morrow. Temistocle and Momino--Momino is Girolamo, you know--will be
+back to-morrow; their rooms have been cleaned, and they shall have a
+flask of real Montepulciano.... The big bottles in the chemist's window
+are very beautiful, particularly the green one. The shop where they sell
+gloves and scarfs is also very pretty; but the English chemist's is the
+prettiest, because of those bottles. But they say the contents of them
+is all rubbish, and no real medicine.... Don't speak of San Bonifazio!
+I have seen it. It is where they keep the mad folk and the wretched,
+dirty, wicked, wicked old women.... There was a handsome book bound
+in red, with gold edges, on the best sitting-room table; the Aeneid,
+translated by Caro. It was one of Temistocle's prizes. And that
+Berlin-wool cushion ... yes, the little dog with the cherries looked
+quite real....
+
+"I have been thinking I should like to go to Sicily, to see Etna, and
+Palermo, and all those places," said Madame Krasinska, leaning on the
+balcony by the side of Prince Mongibello, smoking her fifth or sixth
+cigarette.
+
+She could see the hateful hooked nose, like a nasty hawk's beak, over
+the big black beard, and the creature's leering, languishing black eyes,
+as he looked up into the twilight. She knew quite well what sort of man
+Mongibello was. No woman could approach him, or allow him to approach
+her; and there she was on that balcony alone with him in the dark, far
+from the rest of the party, who were dancing and talking within. And to
+talk of Sicily to him, who was a Sicilian too! But that was what she
+wanted--a scandal, a horror, anything that might deaden those thoughts
+which would go on inside her.... The thought of that strange, lofty
+whitewashed place, which she had never seen, but which she knew so well,
+with an altar in the middle, and rows and rows of beds, each with its
+set-out of bottles and baskets, and horrid slobbering and gibbering old
+women. Oh ... she could hear them!
+
+"I should like to go to Sicily," she said in a tone that was now common
+to her, adding slowly and with emphasis, "but I should like to have
+someone to show me all the sights...."
+
+"Countess," and the black beard of the creature bent over her--close to
+her neck--"how strange--I also feel a great longing to see Sicily once
+more, but not alone--those lovely, lonely valleys...."
+
+Ah!--there was one of the creatures who had sat up in her bed and was
+singing, singing "Casta Diva!" "No, not alone"--she went on hurriedly,
+a sort of fury of satisfaction, of the satisfaction of destroying
+something, destroying her own fame, her own life, filling her as she
+felt the man's hand on her arm--"not alone, Prince--with someone to
+explain things--someone who knows all about it--and in this lovely
+spring weather. You see, I am a bad traveller--and I am afraid ... of
+being alone...." The last words came out of her throat loud, hoarse, and
+yet cracked and shrill--and just as the Prince's arm was going to clasp
+her, she rushed wildly into the room, exclaiming--
+
+"Ah, I am she--I am she--I am mad!"
+
+For in that sudden voice, so different from her own, Madame Krasinska
+had recognised the voice that should have issued from the cardboard mask
+she had once worn, the voice of Sora Lena.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Yes, Cecchino certainly recognised her now. Strolling about in that
+damp May twilight among the old, tortuous streets, he had mechanically
+watched the big black horses draw up at the posts which closed that
+labyrinth of black, narrow alleys; the servant in his white waterproof
+opened the door, and the tall, slender woman got out and walked quickly
+along. And mechanically, in his wool-gathering way, he had followed the
+lady, enjoying the charming note of delicate pink and grey which her
+little frock made against those black houses, and under that wet, grey
+sky, streaked pink with the sunset. She walked quickly along, quite
+alone, having left the footman with the carriage at the entrance of that
+condemned old heart of Florence; and she took no notice of the stares
+and words of the boys playing in the gutters, the pedlars housing their
+barrows under the black archways, and the women leaning out of window.
+Yes; there was no doubt. It had struck him suddenly as he watched her
+pass under a double arch and into a kind of large court, not unlike that
+of a castle, between the frowning tall houses of the old Jews' quarter;
+houses escutcheoned and stanchioned, once the abode of Ghibelline
+nobles, now given over to rag-pickers, scavengers and unspeakable
+trades.
+
+As soon as he recognised her he stopped, and was about to turn: what
+business has a man following a lady, prying into her doings when she
+goes out at twilight, with carriage and footman left several streets
+back, quite alone through unlikely streets? And Cecchino, who by this
+time was on the point of returning to the Maremma, and had come to the
+conclusion that civilisation was a boring and loathsome thing, reflected
+upon the errands which French novels described ladies as performing,
+when they left their carriage and footman round the corner.... But the
+thought was disgraceful to Cecchino, and unjust to this lady--no, no!
+And at this moment he stopped, for the lady had stopped a few paces
+before him, and was staring fixedly into the grey evening sky. There
+was something strange in that stare; it was not that of a woman who is
+hiding disgraceful proceedings. And in staring round she must have
+seen him; yet she stood still, like one wrapped in wild thoughts. Then
+suddenly she passed under the next archway, and disappeared in the dark
+passage of a house. Somehow Cecco Bandini could not make up his mind, as
+he ought to have done long ago, to turn back. He slowly passed through
+the oozy, ill-smelling archway, and stood before that house. It was
+very tall, narrow, and black as ink, with a jagged roof against the
+wet, pinkish sky. From the iron hook, made to hold brocades and Persian
+carpets on gala days of old, fluttered some rags, obscene and ill-omened
+in the wind. Many of the window panes were broken. It was evidently one
+of the houses which the municipality had condemned to destruction for
+sanitary reasons, and whence the inmates were gradually being evicted.
+
+"That's a house they're going to pull down, isn't it?" he inquired in a
+casual tone of the man at the corner, who kept a sort of cookshop, where
+chestnut pudding and boiled beans steamed on a brazier in a den. Then
+his eye caught a half-effaced name close to the lamp-post, "Little
+Street of the Grave-digger." "Ah," he added quickly, "this is the street
+where old Sora Lena committed suicide--and--is--is that the house?"
+
+Then, trying to extricate some reasonable idea out of the extraordinary
+tangle of absurdities which had all of a sudden filled his mind, he
+fumbled in his pocket for a silver coin, and said hurriedly to the man
+with the cooking brazier,
+
+"See here, that house, I'm sure, isn't well inhabited. That lady has
+gone there for a charity--but--but one doesn't know that she mayn't
+be annoyed in there. Here's fifty centimes for your trouble. If that
+lady doesn't come out again in three-quarters of an hour--there! it's
+striking seven--just you go round to the stone posts--you'll find her
+carriage there--black horses and grey liveries--and tell the footman to
+run upstairs to his mistress--understand?" And Cecchino Bandini fled,
+overwhelmed at the thought of the indiscretion he was committing, but
+seeing, as he turned round, those rags waving an ominous salute from the
+black, gaunt house with its irregular roof against the wet, twilight
+sky.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Madame Krasinska hurried though the long black corridor, with its
+slippery bricks and typhoid smell, and went slowly but resolutely up
+the black staircase. Its steps, constructed perhaps in the days of
+Dante's grandfather, when a horn buckle and leathern belt formed the
+only ornaments of Florentine dames, were extraordinarily high, and worn
+off at the edges by innumerable generations of successive nobles and
+paupers. And as it twisted sharply on itself, the staircase was lighted
+at rare intervals by barred windows, overlooking alternately the black
+square outside, with its jags of overhanging roof, and a black yard,
+where a broken well was surrounded by a heap of half-sorted chickens'
+feathers and unpicked rags. On the first landing was an open door,
+partly screened by a line of drying tattered clothes; and whence
+issued shrill sounds of altercation and snatches of tipsy song. Madame
+Krasinska passed on heedless of it all, the front of her delicate frock
+brushing the unseen filth of those black steps, in whose crypt-like
+cold and gloom there was an ever-growing breath of charnel. Higher and
+higher, flight after flight, steps and steps. Nor did she look to the
+right or to the left, nor ever stop to take breath, but climbed upward,
+slowly, steadily. At length she reached the topmost landing, on to which
+fell a flickering beam of the setting sun. It issued from a room, whose
+door was standing wide open. Madame Krasinska entered. The room was
+completely empty, and comparatively light. There was no furniture in it,
+except a chair, pushed into a dark corner, and an empty bird-cage at the
+window. The panes were broken, and here and there had been mended with
+paper. Paper also hung, in blackened rags, upon the walls.
+
+Madame Krasinska walked to the window and looked out over the
+neighbouring roofs, to where the bell in an old black belfry swung
+tolling the Ave Maria. There was a porticoed gallery on the top of a
+house some way off; it had a few plants growing in pipkins, and a drying
+line. She knew it all so well.
+
+On the window-sill was a cracked basin, in which stood a dead basil
+plant, dry, grey. She looked at it some time, moving the hardened earth
+with her fingers. Then she turned to the empty bird-cage. Poor solitary
+starling! how he had whistled to the poor old woman! Then she began to
+cry.
+
+But after a few moments she roused herself. Mechanically, she went to
+the door and closed it carefully. Then she went straight to the dark
+corner, where she knew that the staved-in straw chair stood. She dragged
+it into the middle of the room, where the hook was in the big rafter.
+She stood on the chair, and measured the height of the ceiling. It was
+so low that she could graze it with the palm of her hand. She took off
+her gloves, and then her bonnet--it was in the way of the hook. Then
+she unclasped her girdle, one of those narrow Russian ribbons of silver
+woven stuff, studded with niello. She buckled one end firmly to the big
+hook. Then she unwound the strip of muslin from under her collar. She
+was standing on the broken chair, just under the rafter. "Pater noster
+qui es in caelis," she mumbled, as she still childishly did when putting
+her head on the pillow every night.
+
+The door creaked and opened slowly. The big, hulking woman, with the
+vague, red face and blear stare, and the rabbit-skin muff, bobbing on
+her huge crinolined skirts, shambled slowly into the room. It was the
+Sora Lena.
+
+
+X.
+
+When the man from the cook-shop under the archway and the footman
+entered the room, it was pitch dark. Madame Krasinska was lying in the
+middle of the floor, by the side of an overturned chair, and under a
+hook in the rafter whence hung her Russian girdle. When she awoke from
+her swoon, she looked slowly round the room; then rose, fastened her
+collar and murmured, crossing herself, "O God, thy mercy is infinite."
+The men said that she smiled.
+
+Such is the legend of Madame Krasinska, known as Mother Antoinette Marie
+among the Little Sisters of the Poor.
+
+
+  _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO
+  _Edinburgh and London_
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+One page of advertising has been moved from the beginning of the text to
+the end of the listings following this note.
+
+Missing punctuation has been silently added, especially quotation marks.
+Hyphenation is inconsistent.
+
+The following additional changes have been made to the text:
+
+ Wanderwerf ==> Vanderwerf (... implored Mrs. Vanderwerf ...)
+ Musuem     ==> Museum (... to the South Kensington Museum ...)
+ facon      ==> facon (... c'est notre facon ...)
+
+In the advertising following this note, the name Bacharcah was corrected
+to read Bacharach.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+  _Mr. William Heinemann's List._
+
+
+  VICTORIA:
+  QUEEN AND EMPRESS.
+
+  BY
+  JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
+
+  Author of "The Real Lord Byron," etc.
+  In Two Volumes, 8vo. With Portraits.          [_In October._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE
+  SECRET SERVICE.
+
+  _THE RECOLLECTIONS OF A SPY._
+
+  BY
+  MAJOR LE CARON.
+
+  In One Volume, 8vo. With Portraits and Facsimiles.
+                                                [_In October._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  REMINISCENCES OF
+  COUNT LEO NICHOLAEVITCH
+  TOLSTOI.
+
+  BY
+  C. A. BEHRS,
+
+  TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
+  PROFESSOR C. E. TURNER.
+
+  In One Volume, Crown 8vo.                     [_In October._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  THE REALM OF THE HABSBURGS
+
+  BY
+  SIDNEY WHITMAN,
+
+  Author of "Imperial Germany."
+  In One Volume. Crown 8vo.                    [_In November._
+
+
+ THE WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
+ Translated by CHARLES GODFREY LELAND, M.A., F.R.L.S. (Hans Breitmann).
+ Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._ per Volume.
+
+
+  I. FLORENTINE NIGHTS, SCHNABELEWOPSKI, THE RABBI OF BACHARACH, and
+     SHAKESPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN.
+                                                     [_Ready._
+
+     _Times._--"We can recommend no better medium for making
+     acquaintance at first hand with 'the German Aristophanes' than
+     the works of Heinrich Heine, translated by Charles Godfrey
+     Leland. Mr. Leland manages pretty successfully to preserve the
+     easy grace of the original."
+
+
+  II., III. PICTURES OF TRAVEL. 1823-1828. In Two Volumes.
+                                                     [_Ready._
+
+     _Daily Chronicle._--"Mr. Leland's translation of 'The Pictures of
+     Travel' is one of the acknowledged literary feats of the age. As
+     a traveller Heine is delicious beyond description, and a volume
+     which includes the magnificent Lucca series, the North Sea, the
+     memorable Hartz wanderings, must needs possess an everlasting
+     charm."
+
+
+  IV. THE BOOK OF SONGS.                      [_In the Press._
+
+
+  V., VI. GERMANY. In Two Volumes.                   [_Ready._
+
+     _Daily Telegraph._--"Mr. Leland has done his translation in able
+     and scholarly fashion."
+
+
+  VII., VIII. FRENCH AFFAIRS. In Two Volumes. [_In the Press._
+
+
+  IX. THE SALON.                            [_In preparation._
+
+  * * _Large Paper Edition, limited to 100 Numbered Copies. Particulars
+   *  on application._
+
+
+THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY. Edited with Introduction and
+Notes from the Author's Original MSS., by ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL. D.,
+F.R.S.E., &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._ each.
+
+
+  I. SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS. With Other Essays.
+
+     _Times._--"Here we have De Quincey at his best. Will be welcome
+     to lovers of De Quincey and good literature."
+
+
+  II. CONVERSATION AND COLERIDGE. With other Essays.
+                                            [_In preparation._
+
+
+_The Great Educators._
+
+_A Series of Volumes by Eminent Writers, presenting in their entirety
+"A Biographical History of Education."_
+
+     _The Times._--"A Series of Monographs on 'The Great Educators'
+     should prove of service to all who concern themselves with the
+     history, theory, and practice of education."
+
+     _The Speaker._--"There is a promising sound about the title of
+     Mr. Heinemann's new series, 'The Great Educators.' It should help
+     to allay the hunger and thirst for knowledge and culture of the
+     vast multitude of young men and maidens which our educational
+     system turns out yearly, provided at least with an appetite for
+     instruction."
+
+Each subject will form a complete volume, crown 8vo, 5_s._
+
+
+_Now ready._
+
+  ARISTOTLE, and the Ancient Educational Ideals.
+  By Thomas Davidson, M.A., LL. D.
+
+     _The Times._--"A very readable sketch of a very interesting
+     subject."
+
+
+  LOYOLA, and the Educational System of the Jesuits.
+  By REV. THOMAS HUGHES, S.J.
+
+     _Saturday Review._--"Full of valuable information.... If a
+     schoolmaster would learn how the education of the young can be
+     carried on so as to confer real dignity on those engaged in it,
+     we recommend him to read Mr. Hughes' book."
+
+
+  ALCUIN, and the Rise of the Christian Schools.
+  By Professor ANDREW F. WEST, Ph.D.            [_In October._
+
+
+_In preparation._
+
+  ABELARD, and the Origin and Early History of Universities.
+  By JULES GABRIEL COMPAYRE, Professor in the Faculty of Toulouse.
+
+  ROUSSEAU; or, Education according to Nature.
+
+  HERBART; or, Modern German Education.
+
+  PESTALOZZI; or, the Friend and Student of Children.
+
+  FROEBEL. By H. COURTHOPE BOWEN, M.A.
+
+  HORACE MANN, and Public Education in the United States.
+  By NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, Ph.D.
+
+  BELL, LANCASTER, and ARNOLD; or, the English Education of To-Day.
+  By J. G. FITCH, LL. D., Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools.
+
+_Others to follow._
+
+
+THE GREAT WAR OF 189-. A Forecast.
+  By REAR-ADMIRAL COLOMB, COL. MAURICE, R.A., MAJOR HENDERSON, STAFF
+  COLLEGE, CAPTAIN MAUDE, ARCHIBALD FORBES, CHARLES LOWE, D. CHRISTIE
+  MURRAY, F. SCUDAMORE, and SIR CHARLES DILKE.
+  In One Volume, 4to, Illustrated.
+
+     In this narrative, which is reprinted from the pages of _Black
+     and White_, an attempt is made to forecast the course of events
+     preliminary and incidental to the Great War which, in the opinion
+     of military and political experts, will probably occur in the
+     immediate future.
+
+     The writers, who are well-known authorities on international
+     politics and strategy, have striven to derive the conflict from
+     its most likely source, to conceive the most probable campaigns
+     and acts of policy, and generally to give to their work the
+     verisimilitude and actuality of real warfare. The work has been
+     profusely illustrated from sketches by Mr. Frederic Villiers, the
+     well-known war artist.                   [_Nearly ready._
+
+
+THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES.
+  As pleasingly exemplified in many instances, wherein the serious
+  ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred
+  on to indiscretions and unseemliness, while overcome by an undue sense
+  of right.
+  By J. M'NEIL WHISTLER. _A New Edition._
+  Pott 4to, half cloth, 10_s._ 6_d._            [_Just ready._
+
+     _Punch_.--"The book in itself, in its binding, print and
+     arrangement, is a work of art.... A work of rare humour, a thing
+     of beauty and a joy for now and ever."
+
+
+THE JEW AT HOME.
+  Impressions of a Summer and Autumn Spent with Him in Austria
+  and Russia.
+  By JOSEPH PENNELL. With Illustrations by the Author.
+  4to, cloth, 5_s._                             [_Just ready._
+
+
+THE NEW EXODUS.
+  A Study of Israel in Russia.
+  By HAROLD FREDERIC.
+  Demy 8vo, Illustrated. 16_s._                 [_Just ready._
+
+
+PRINCE BISMARCK. An Historical Biography.
+  By CHARLES LOWE, M.A. With Portraits.
+  Crown 8vo, 6_s._                              [_Just ready._
+
+     _The Times_.--"Is unquestionably the first important work which
+     deals, fully and with some approach to exhaustiveness, with the
+     career of Bismarck from both the personal and the historical
+     points of view."
+
+
+ADDRESSES. By HENRY IRVING.
+  Small crown 8vo. With Portrait by J. M'N. Whistler.
+                                              [_In the Press._
+
+
+STRAY MEMORIES.
+  By ELLEN TERRY. 4to. With Portraits.      [_In preparation._
+
+
+LITTLE JOHANNES. By FREDERICK VAN EEDEN.
+  Translated from the Dutch by CLARA BELL.
+  With an Introduction by ANDREW LANG. Illustrated.
+                                            [_In Preparation._
+     * * _Also a Large Paper Edition._
+      *
+
+
+LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE. By RICHARD GARNETT, LL. D.
+  With Portrait. Crown 8vo (uniform with the translation of Heine's Works).
+                                            [_In preparation._
+
+
+THE SPEECH OF MONKEYS. By Professor R. L. GARNER.
+  Crown 8vo, 7_s._ 6_d._                        [_Just ready._
+
+     _Daily Chronicle_.--"A real, a remarkable, contribution to our
+     common knowledge."
+
+     _Daily Telegraph_.--"An entertaining book."
+
+
+THE OLD MAIDS' CLUB. By I. ZANGWILL, Author of "The Bachelors' Club."
+  Illustrated by F. H. TOWNSEND. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _National Review_.--"Mr. Zangwill has a very bright and a very
+     original humour, and every page of this closely printed book is
+     full of point and go, and full, too, of a healthy satire that is
+     really humorously applied common-sense."
+
+     _Athenaeum_.--"Most strongly to be recommended to all classes of
+     readers."
+
+
+WOMAN--THROUGH A MAN'S EYEGLASS. By MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.
+  With Illustrations by DUDLEY HARDY. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _Daily Graphic._--"A most amusing book."
+
+     _Daily Telegraph._--"Written with brightness and elegance, and
+     with touches of both caustic satire and kindly humour."
+
+     _Daily Chronicle._--"It is the very thing for a punt cushion or a
+     garden hammock."
+
+
+GIRLS AND WOMEN. By E. CHESTER.
+  Pott 8vo, cloth, 2_s._ 6_d._, or gilt extra, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _Literary World._--"We gladly commend this delightful little work
+     to the thoughtful girls of our own country. We hope that many
+     parents and daughters will read and ponder over the little
+     volume."
+
+
+GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY.
+  By EDMUND GOSSE, Author of "Northern Studies," &c.
+  Second Edition. Crown 8vo, buckram, gilt top, 7_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _Athenaeum._--"There is a touch of Leigh Hunt in this picture of
+     the book-lover among his books, and the volume is one that Leigh
+     Hunt would have delighted in."
+
+     * * _Large Paper Edition, limited to 100 Numbered Copies, 25s. net._
+      *
+
+
+THE LIFE OF HENRIK IBSEN. By HENRIK JAEGER. Translated by CLARA BELL.
+  With the Verse done into English from the Norwegian Original
+  by EDMUND GOSSE.
+  Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
+
+     _Academy._--"We welcome it heartily. An unqualified boon to the
+     many English students of Ibsen."
+
+
+DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS.
+  Being Letters and other Records here first Published, with
+  Communications from COLERIDGE, The WORDSWORTHS, HANNAH MORE,
+  PROFESSOR WILSON and others. Edited, with Introduction, Notes,
+  and Narrative, by ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL. D. F.R.S.E.
+  In two volumes, demy 8vo, cloth, with portraits, 30_s._ net.
+
+     _Daily Telegraph._--"Few works of greater literary interest have
+     of late years issued from the press than the two volumes of 'De
+     Quincey Memorials.' They comprise most valuable materials for the
+     historian of literary and social England at the beginning of the
+     century; but they are not on that account less calculated to
+     amuse, enlighten, and absorb the general reader of biographical
+     memoirs."
+
+
+THE WORD OF THE LORD UPON THE WATERS.
+  Sermons read by His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Germany,
+  while at Sea on his Voyages to the Land of the Midnight Sun.
+  Composed by Dr. RICHTER, Army Chaplain, and Translated from the
+  German by JOHN R. MCILRAITH. 4to, cloth, 2_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _Times._--"The Sermons are vigorous, simple, and vivid in
+     themselves, and well adapted to the circumstances in which they
+     were delivered."
+
+
+THE HOURS OF RAPHAEL, IN OUTLINE. Together with the Ceiling of the
+  Hall where they were originally painted.
+  By MARY E. WILLIAMS. Folio, cloth, L2 2_s._ net.
+
+
+THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU, 1890.
+  By F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., Archdeacon and Canon of Westminster
+  &c. &c. 4to, cloth, 2_s._ 6_d._
+
+     _Spectator._--"This little book will be read with delight by
+     those who have, and by those who have not, visited Oberammergau."
+
+
+THE GARDEN'S STORY; or, Pleasures and Trials of an Amateur Gardener.
+  By G. H. ELLWANGER. With an Introduction by the Rev. C. WOLLEY DOD.
+  12mo, cloth, with Illustrations, 5_s._
+
+     _Scotsman._--"It deals with a charming subject in a charming
+     manner."
+
+
+IDLE MUSINGS: Essays in Social Mosaic.
+  By E. CONDER GRAY, Author of "Wise Words and Loving Deeds," &c. &c.
+  Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
+
+     _Saturday Review._--"Light, brief, and bright."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+_Fiction._
+
+
+In Three Volumes.
+
+     THE HEAD OF THE FIRM. By Mrs. RIDDELL, Author of "George Geith,"
+     "Maxwell Drewett," &c.                     [_Just ready._
+
+     CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO. By I. ZANGWILL, Author of "The Old Maids'
+     Club," &c.                                 [_Just ready._
+
+     THE TOWER OF TADDEO. A Novel. By OUIDA, Author of "Two Little
+     Wooden Shoes," &c.                         [_In October._
+
+     KITTY'S FATHER. By FRANK BARRETT. Author of "Lieutenant
+     Barnabas," &c.                            [_In November._
+
+     THE COUNTESS RADNA. By W. E. NORRIS, Author of "Matrimony," &c.
+                                                [_In January._
+
+     ORIOLE'S DAUGHTER. A Novel. By JESSIE FOTHERGILL, Author of "The
+     First Violin," &c.                        [_In February._
+
+     THE LAST SENTENCE. By MAXWELL GRAY, Author of "The Silence of
+     Dean Maitland," &c.                          [_In March._
+
+
+In Two Volumes.
+
+     WOMAN AND THE MAN. A Love Story. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of
+     "Come Live with Me and be My Love," "The Moment After," "The
+     Coming Terror," &c.                    [_In preparation._
+
+     A KNIGHT OF THE WHITE FEATHER. By "TASMA," Author of "The Penance
+     of Portia James," "Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill," &c.
+                                                [_Just ready._
+
+     A LITTLE MINX. By ADA CAMBRIDGE, Author of "A Marked Man," "The
+     Three Miss Kings," &c.
+
+
+In One Volume.
+
+     THE NAULAHKA. A Tale of West and East. By RUDYARD KIPLING and
+     WOLCOTT BALESTIER. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._ Second Edition.
+                                                [_Just ready._
+
+     THE AVERAGE WOMAN. By WOLCOTT BALESTIER. With an Introduction by
+     Henry James. Small crown 8vo, 3_s._ 6_d._  [_Just ready._
+
+     THE ATTACK ON THE MILL and Other Sketches of War. By EMILE ZOLA.
+     With an essay on the short stories of M. Zola by Edmund Gosse.
+     Small crown 8vo, 3_s._ 6_d._               [_Just ready._
+
+     DUST. By BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON. Translated from the Norwegian.
+     Small crown 8vo.
+
+     THE SECRET OF NARCISSE. By EDMUND GOSSE. Crown 8vo.
+                                                [_In October._
+
+     MADEMOISELLE MISS and Other Stories. By HENRY HARLAND, Author
+     of "Mea Culpa," &c. Small crown 8vo.     [_In the Press._
+
+     THE DOMINANT SEVENTH. A Musical Story. By KATE ELIZABETH CLARKE.
+     Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._
+        _Speaker._--"A very romantic story."
+
+     PASSION THE PLAYTHING. A Novel. By R. MURRAY GILCHRIST. Crown
+     8vo, cloth, 6_s._
+        _Athenaeum._--"This well-written story must be read to be
+        appreciated."
+
+
+
+
+_Heinemann's International Library._
+
+EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE.
+
+
+_New Review._--"If you have any pernicious remnants of literary
+chauvinism I hope it will not survive the series of foreign classics of
+which Mr. William Heinemann, aided by Mr. Edmund Gosse, is publishing
+translations to the great contentment of all lovers of literature."
+
+    _Times._--"A venture which deserves encouragement."
+
+    _Each Volume has an Introduction specially written by the Editor._
+
+       Price, in paper covers, 2_s._ 6_d._ each, or cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+
+IN GOD'S WAY. From the Norwegian of BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON.
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"Without doubt the most important and the most
+    interesting work published during the twelve months..... There are
+    descriptions which certainly belong to the best and cleverest
+    things our literature has ever produced. Amongst the many
+    characters, the doctor's wife is unquestionably the first. It
+    would be difficult to find anything more tender, soft, and refined
+    than this charming personage."
+
+
+PIERRE AND JEAN. From the French of GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+    _Pall Mall Gazette._--"So fine and faultless, so perfectly
+    balanced, so steadily progressive, so clear and simple and
+    satisfying. It is admirable from beginning to end."
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"Ranks amongst the best gems of modern French
+    fiction."
+
+
+THE CHIEF JUSTICE. From the German of KARL EMIL FRANZOS,
+  Author of "For the Right," &c.
+
+    _New Review._--"Few novels of recent times have a more sustained
+    and vivid human interest."
+
+    _Christian World._--"A story of wonderful power ... as free from
+    anything objectionable as 'The Heart of Midlothian.'"
+
+
+WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT. From the Russian of Count LYOF TOLSTOY.
+
+    _Liverpool Mercury._--"Marked by all the old power of the great
+    Russian novelist."
+
+    _Manchester Guardian._--"Readable and well translated; full of
+    high and noble feeling."
+
+
+FANTASY. From the Italian of MATILDE SERAO.
+
+    _National Observer._--"The strongest work from the hand of a woman
+    that has been published for many a day."
+
+    _Scottish Leader._--"The book is full of a glowing and living
+    realism.... There is nothing like 'Fantasy' in modern literature....
+    It is a work of elfish art, a mosaic of light and love, of right
+    and wrong, of human weakness and strength, and purity and wantonness,
+    pieced together in deft and witching precision."
+
+
+FROTH. From the Spanish of Don ARMANDO PALACIO-VALDES.
+
+    _Daily Telegraph._--"Vigorous and powerful in the highest degree.
+    It abounds in forcible delineation of character, and describes
+    scenes with rare and graphic strength."
+
+
+FOOTSTEPS OF FATE. From the Dutch of LOUIS COUPERUS.
+
+    _Daily Chronicle._--"A powerfully realistic story which has been
+    excellently translated."
+
+    _Gentlewoman._--"The consummate art of the writer prevents this
+    tragedy from sinking to melodrama. Not a single situation is
+    forced or a circumstance exaggerated."
+
+
+PEPITA JIMENEZ. From the Spanish of JUAN VALERA.
+
+    _New Review_ (Mr. George Saintsbury):--"There is no doubt at all
+    that it is one of the best stories that have appeared in any
+    country in Europe for the last twenty years."
+
+
+THE COMMODORE'S DAUGHTERS. From the Norwegian of JONAS LIE.
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"Everything that Jonas Lie writes is attractive and
+    pleasant; the plot of deeply human interest, and the art noble."
+
+
+THE HERITAGE OF THE KURTS. From the Norwegian of BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON.
+
+    _Pall Mall Gazette._--"A most fascinating as well as a powerful
+    book."
+
+    _National Observer._--"It is a book to read and a book to think
+    about, for, incontestably, it is the work of a man of genius."
+
+
+  _In the Press._
+
+ LOU. From the German of BARON V. ROBERTS.
+
+ DONA LUZ. From the Spanish of JUAN VALERA.
+
+ WITHOUT DOGMA. From the Polish of H. SIENKIEWICZ.
+
+
+
+
+_Popular 3s. 6d. Novels._
+
+CAPT'N DAVY'S HONEYMOON, The Blind Mother, and The Last Confession.
+  By HALL CAINE, Author of "The Bondman," "The Scapegoat," &c.
+
+THE SCAPEGOAT. By HALL CAINE, Author of "The Bondman," &c.
+
+    _Mr. Gladstone writes_:--"I congratulate you upon 'The Scapegoat'
+    as a work of art, and especially upon the noble and skilfully
+    drawn character of Israel."
+
+    _Times._--"In our judgment it excels in dramatic force all his
+    previous efforts. For grace and touching pathos Naomi is a
+    character which any romancist in the world might be proud to have
+    created."
+
+THE BONDMAN. A New Saga. By HALL CAINE. Twentieth Thousand.
+
+    _Mr. Gladstone._--"'The Bondman' is a work of which I recognise
+    the freshness, vigour, and sustained interest no less than its
+    integrity of aim."
+
+    _Standard._--"Its argument is grand, and it is sustained with a
+    power that is almost marvellous."
+
+
+DESPERATE REMEDIES. By THOMAS HARDY, Author of "Tess of the
+D'Urbervilles," &c.
+
+    _Saturday Review._--"A remarkable story worked out with abundant
+    skill."
+
+
+A MARKED MAN: Some Episodes in his Life. By ADA CAMBRIDGE, Author of
+"Two Years' Time," "A Mere Chance," &c.
+
+    _Morning Post._--"A depth of feeling, a knowledge of the human
+    heart, and an amount of tact that one rarely finds. Should take a
+    prominent place among the novels of the season."
+
+
+THE THREE MISS KINGS. By ADA CAMBRIDGE, Author of "A Marked Man."
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"A charming study of character. The love stories are
+    excellent, and the author is happy in tender situations."
+
+
+NOT ALL IN VAIN. By ADA CAMBRIDGE, Author of "A Marked Man," "The Three
+Miss Kings," &c.
+
+    _Guardian._--"A clever and absorbing story."
+
+    _Queen._--"All that remains to be said is 'read the book.'"
+
+
+UNCLE PIPER OF PIPER'S HILL. By TASMA. New Popular Edition.
+
+    _Guardian._--"Every page of it contains good wholesome food, which
+    demands and repays digestion. The tale itself is thoroughly
+    charming, and all the characters are delightfully drawn. We
+    strongly recommend all lovers of wholesome novels to make
+    acquaintance with it themselves, and are much mistaken if
+    they do not heartily thank us for the introduction."
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY. By HAROLD FREDERIC, Author of "The Lawton Girl," "Seth's
+Brother's Wife," &c. With Illustrations.
+
+    _Times._--"The literary value of the book is high; the author's
+    studies of bygone life presenting a life-like picture."
+
+
+PRETTY MISS SMITH. By FLORENCE WARDEN, Author of "The House on the
+Marsh," "A Witch of the Hills," &c.
+
+    _Punch._--"Since Miss Florence Warden's 'House on the Marsh,' I
+    have not read a more exciting tale."
+
+
+NOR WIFE, NOR MAID. By Mrs. HUNGERFORD, Author of "Molly Bawn," &c.
+
+    _Queen._--"It has all the characteristics of the writer's work,
+    and greater emotional depth than most of its predecessors."
+
+    _Scotsman._--"Delightful reading, supremely interesting."
+
+
+MAMMON. A Novel. By Mrs. ALEXANDER, Author of "The Wooing O't," &c.
+
+    _Scotsman._--"The present work is not behind any of its
+    predecessors. 'Mammon' is a healthy story, and as it has been
+    thoughtfully written it has the merit of creating thought in its
+    readers."
+
+
+DAUGHTERS OF MEN. By HANNAH LYNCH, Author of "The Prince of the Glades,"
+&c.
+
+    _Daily Telegraph._--"Singularly clever and fascinating."
+
+    _Academy._--"One of the cleverest, if not also the pleasantest,
+    stories that have appeared for a long time."
+
+
+A ROMANCE OF THE CAPE FRONTIER. By BERTRAM MITFORD, Author of "Through
+the Zulu Country," &c.
+
+    _Observer._--"This is a rattling tale, genial, healthy, and
+    spirited."
+
+'TWEEN SNOW AND FIRE. A Tale of the Kafir War of 1877. By BERTRAM
+MITFORD.
+
+
+THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS. By ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS and HERBERT D.
+WARD.
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"A thrilling story."
+
+
+LOS CERRITOS. A Romance of the Modern Time. By GERTRUDE FRANKLIN
+ATHERTON, Author of "Hermia Suydam," and "What Dreams may Come."
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"Full of fresh fancies and suggestions. Told with
+    strength and delicacy. A decidedly charming romance."
+
+
+A MODERN MARRIAGE. By the Marquise CLARA LANZA.
+
+    _Queen._--"A powerful story, dramatically and consistently carried
+    out."
+
+    _Black and White._--"A decidedly clever book."
+
+
+
+
+_Popular Shilling Books._
+
+
+MADAME VALERIE. By F. C. PHILIPS, Author of "As in a Looking-Glass," &c.
+
+
+THE MOMENT AFTER: A Tale of the Unseen. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
+
+    _Athenaeum._--"Should be read--in daylight."
+
+    _Observer._--"A clever _tour de force._"
+
+    _Guardian._--"Particularly impressive, graphic, and powerful."
+
+
+CLUES; or, Leaves from a Chief Constable's Note-Book.
+  By WILLIAM HENDERSON, Chief Constable of Edinburgh.
+
+    _Mr. Gladstone._--"I found the book full of interest."
+
+
+A VERY STRANGE FAMILY. By F. W. ROBINSON, Author of "Grandmother's
+Money," "Lazarus in London," &c.
+
+    _Glasgow Herald._--"An ingeniously devised plot, of which the
+    interest is kept up to the very last page. A judicious blending
+    of humour and pathos further helps to make the book delightful
+    reading from start to finish."
+
+
+
+
+_Dramatic Literature._
+
+THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR W. PINERO.
+
+With Introductory Notes by MALCOLM C. SALAMAN. 16mo, Paper Covers, 1_s._
+6_d._; or Cloth, 2_s._ 6_d._ each.
+
+
+THE TIMES: A Comedy in Four Acts. With a Preface by the Author. (Vol. I.)
+
+    _Daily Telegraph._--"'The Times' is the best example yet given of
+    Mr. Pinero's power as a satirist. So clever is his work that it
+    beats down opposition. So fascinating is his style that we cannot
+    help listening to him."
+
+    _Morning Post._--"Mr. Pinero's latest belongs to a high order of
+    dramatic literature, and the piece will be witnessed again with
+    all the greater zest after the perusal of such admirable
+    dialogue."
+
+
+THE PROFLIGATE: A Play in Four Acts. With Portrait of the Author, after
+  J. MORDECAI. (Vol. II.)
+
+    _Pall Mall Gazette._--"Will be welcomed by all who have the true
+    interests of the stage at heart."
+
+
+THE CABINET MINISTER: A Farce in Four Acts. (Vol. III.)
+
+    _Observer._--"It is as amusing to read as it was when played."
+
+
+THE HOBBY HORSE: A Comedy in Three Acts. (Vol. IV.)
+
+    _St. James's Gazette._--"Mr. Pinero has seldom produced better or
+    more interesting work than in 'The Hobby Horse.'"
+
+
+LADY BOUNTIFUL. A Play in Four Acts. (Vol. V.)
+
+
+THE MAGISTRATE. A Farce in Three Acts. (Vol. VI.)
+
+    To be followed by Dandy Dick, The Schoolmistress, The Weaker Sex,
+    Lords and Commons, The Squire, and Sweet Lavender.
+
+
+
+
+  The Crown Copyright Series.
+
+  _Crown 8vo, cloth extra, price 5s. each._
+
+  ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. By AMELIE RIVES, Author
+  of "The Quick or the Dead."
+
+  _Scotsman._--"... It has beauty and brightness, and a kind
+  of fascination which carries the reader on till he has read to the
+  last page."
+
+  THE PENANCE OF PORTIA JAMES. By TASMA,
+  Author of "Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill," &c.
+
+  _Athenaeum._--"A powerful novel."
+
+  INCONSEQUENT LIVES. A Village Chronicle. By
+  J. H. PEARCE, Author of "Esther Pentreath," &c.
+
+  _Saturday Review._--"A vivid picture of the life of Cornish
+  fisher-folk. It is unquestionably interesting."
+
+  A QUESTION OF TASTE. By MAARTEN MAARTENS,
+  Author of "An Old Maid's Love," &c.
+
+  _National Observer._--"There is more than cleverness; there
+  is original talent, and a good deal of humanity besides."
+
+  COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE. By
+  ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of "The Moment After,"
+  "The Coming Terror," &c.
+
+  _Daily Telegraph._--"We will conclude this brief notice by
+  expressing our cordial admiration of the skill displayed in its
+  construction, and the genial humanity that has inspired its
+  author in the shaping and vitalising of the individuals created
+  by his fertile imagination."
+
+  VANITAS. By VERNON LEE, Author of "Hauntings," &c.
+
+  THE O'CONNORS OF BALLINAHINCH. By Mrs.
+  HUNGERFORD, Author of "Molly Bawn," &c.
+
+  A BATTLE AND A BOY. By BLANCHE WILLIS
+  HOWARD, Author of "Guenn," &c.
+
+
+  LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN,
+  21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VANITAS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 34252.txt or 34252.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/4/2/5/34252
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+