treets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger
but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn't fly back to her mountains
because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of
purpose, predatory instincts. . . .

No, we didn't remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as
her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand. She was
prayerful. She was terrible. Her one-idead peasant mind was as
inaccessible as a closed iron safe. She was fatal. . . It's perfectly
ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to
you like this in all sincerity I don't mind appearing ridiculous. I
suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this
earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious
or more frightful figures?

We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt's half-hidden acrimony
develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allegre
and the girl Rita. Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story,
passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he
called, the characteristic Allegre impudence--which surpassed the
impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degrees--the
revelation of Rita's existence to the world at large. It wasn't a very
large world, but then it was most choicely composed. How is one to
describe it shortly? In a sentence it was the world that rides in the
morning in the Bois.

In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her
sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his
wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of
the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of
sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took
her out with him for their first morning ride.

"I leave you to judge of the sensation," continued Mr. Blunt, with a
faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth. "And
the consternation," he added venomously. "Many of those men on that
great morning had some one of their womankind with them. But their hats
had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were
under some sort of obligation to Allegre. You would be astonished to
hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to
mince matters, owed money to Allegre. And I don't mean in the world of
art