lectual faculties," she said to
him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.

The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered
gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida
on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal. It
changed insensibly enough, through the freemasonry of
confessed and unconfessed ideals, through growing
attraction, through the feeling they shared, though only
Janet voiced it, that there was nothing but the
opportunities and the experience of four years between
them, that in the end Elfrida would do better, stronger,
more original work than she. Elfrida was so much more
original a person, Janet declared to herself, so--and
when she hesitated for this word she usually said
"enigmatical." The answer to the enigma, Janet was sure,
would be written large in publishers' advertisements one
day. In the meantime, it was a vast satisfaction to Janet
to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to consider it with
the privileges of intimacy. These young women felt their
friendship deeply, in their several ways. It held for
them all sacredness and honor and obligation. For Elfrida
it had an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio
--she had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her
friends--and for Janet it added something to existence
that was not there before, more delightful and important
than a mere opportunity of expansion. The time came
speedily when it would have been a positive pain to either
of them to hear the other discussed, however favorably.

CHAPTER XVI.

Lady Halifax and her daughter had met Miss Bell several
times at the Cardiffs', in a casual way, before it occurred
to either of them to take any sort of advantage of the
acquaintance. The younger lady had a shivering and
frightened delight in occasionally wading ankle-deep in
unconventionality, but she had-lively recollections, in
connection with the Cardiffs, of having been very nearly
taken off her feet. They had since decided that it was
more discreet to ignore Janet's enthusiasms, which were
sometimes quite impossible in their verdict, and always
improbable. The literary ladies and gentlemen whom the
ghost of the departed Sir William brought more or less
unwillingly to Lady Halifax's drawing-rooms were all of
unexceptionable _cachet_; the Halifaxes were constantly
seeing paragraphs about them in the "Literary Gossip"
department of the _Athenian_, mentioning their state of
health, their ret